The Antagonist (16 page)

Even though he always was, of course, nice to Tina, to her face. Kyle was nice to everyone to their faces. Inordinately nice. He’d maybe talk to you for five seconds, but in those seconds he’d turn his face to you entirely, let it beam his love and fellowship. Every woman on campus was convinced he found her fascinating.

One morning they actually found one sleeping and shivering, curled up outside the back door. This was late October. Kyle had not even come home that night. Wade had given her a cup of instant Maxwell House, which she blubbered into. When do you expect him back? she asked, once she’d regained the power of speech. I have his scarf. And there’s this book he said he wanted to borrow. I brought it for him. She held it up.
Anne of Green Gables.

You could not feel more sorry for a person, yet they’d all laughed once she was gone and teased Kyle about it forever.

But of course Kyle loved to be teased about this sort of thing.

It seemed to Rank, which he did not say or even give any indication of to Adam as they walked back from the liquor store, that Kyle was a bad influence. It sounded very 1950s, but he remembered laughing at and with Kyle about the girl in the doorway, and it made him angry at himself. He was not that sort of guy. You don’t laugh at a woman shivering in a doorway, no matter how deluded she might be.

You don’t stop your conversation, look at your friends, then look away, moments after you hear the sound of someone getting smacked coming from your buddy’s bedroom in the middle of the night. A smack, followed by a groan. Or grunt. A human sound, in any event, of pain. Almost certainly of pain. That is something else you do not do.

But Kyle Jarvis is, after all, a magic man. This has been established. Kyle somehow worked his mojo and kept them in their seats.

So by the time Kyle gets back to the Temple after his late class, his buddy Rank — who has been making innocuous if feverish conversation with Adam for the last three hours and given no indication of his mood whatsoever — is more or less ready to kill him.

08/04/09, 4:25 p.m.

BRIEF INTERMISSION HERE TO
relay what I have to contend with now that Gord’s ankle is healing and he knows what I am up to in the back bedroom.

Crutch-bash!
A nice solid
whack
that vibrates one entire wall of my room. He has to be standing directly outside my door.

“How’s it going in there son?”

“Well you just scared the shit out of me and I spilled my coffee everywhere, but otherwise it’s fine, Gord, thanks.”

“You need any help?”

“You can put on more coffee if you’re up to it.”

“No, I mean with your book stupidarse. “

A befuddled pause. This is the first time he’s even acknowledged what I’m doing since he learned I wasn’t in here compulsively masturbating. Since the revelation that provoked his attack on Sylvie’s teapot.

“Help?” I say. “With my book?”

“Like when you called me that time. I got a good memory for details. Thought you might need help.”

“No, I — not right now. I’ll let you know, Gord, okay?”

“Don’t forget to tell them about that nice letter Owen wrote the judge.”

I’m sitting there in front of the laptop holding the dirty T-shirt I’ve been using to sop up the spilled coffee. The stench of it co-mingling with my sweat fills the room. Gord is talking about my release at age sixteen, after Owen wrote a letter to the judge to help get me out of the Youth Centre early so I wouldn’t have to start the school year midway through. It was, according to the judge, a “glowing” letter.

“Yeah,” I say. “Wow. I forgot about that letter.”

“This is why you need me. I still have it somewhere.”

“How the hell did
you
get a copy?”

“I asked him for one. You want me to dig it up?”

“No, Gord. That’s okay. I gotta get back to this.”

Silence. I chuck the T-shirt into the closet, read over where I was, am just about to hit a key, and then:

“Make sure you tell them about your hockey scholarship! And that you went to university.”

I have to smile at Gord’s “them.” Who is
them?
Who does Gord think I’m in here appealing to?

“Yeah. I will,” I say. “I’ll tell them, Gord.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, son.”

“No — I won’t.”

“I dug out some more old pictures for ya. You gonna use pictures?”

I drop my poised hands into my lap, collapse backward in my chair.

“I didn’t plan on it, no.”

“You
should.
I hate a book without pictures. Most people don’t even bother if there’s no pictures.”

“Well —”

“A picture’s worth a thousand words, they say.”

“It’s not really —”

“Might help jar your memory in any case.”

“I’ll take a look at them when I’m —”

“I’ll bring em in. Can I come in?”

He’s already in.

08/04/09, 11:58 p.m.

EVERYONE GETS THAT SOMETHING
is wrong practically the moment Kyle plunks himself down on the couch with a beer to join them. Who knows what Adam and Rank have been talking about up until this point. They’ve been drinking for hours, playing Century, downing shots, except Adam’s shots have all been beer whereas Rank has at some point switched to rye. Rank has mostly been trying to get Adam to talk about himself for a change. Rank wants to know about Adam’s family, his parents, his sisters. He has learned that Adam has only sisters, two of them, which Rank finds puzzling considering his friend’s ineptitude with women. Rank always figured guys who had sisters totally got the dirt, entered the world of sexual gamesmanship packing a distinct advantage. Rank also learns that Adam’s parents are divorced, which, as a Catholic, he finds very cosmopolitan and a little shocking. Not only divorced, but still friends, says Adam. Not only still friends but planning on getting together with Adam and his sisters for a big two-parent family Christmas. Rank is impressed. Divorce, he thinks dimly. If only. You get a lock, if you’re not Catholic, but at least you get the key as well. They don’t make you throw away the key. You’re not meant to kneel on the goose until it’s dead.

“Goose?” says Adam.

“What?” says Rank.

“Statistics,” says Kyle, plunking himself down on the couch beside Adam. “Is a bullshit course. That’s what I’ve decided. Why does a humanities major have to do Statistics?”

This is Kyle in a nutshell. He doesn’t wait to be included in a conversation that’s already taking place without him. This whole “without Kyle” phenomenon is of no interest whatsoever. He simply sits down, interrupts, and starts a new one with himself comfortably at the centre.

“Are Stats some kind of pre-Law requirement?” asks Adam.

“You know what else is bullshit?” Rank mumbles from his chair. “Hitting women in the face.”

The other guys laugh, because Rank is so drunk they assume he’s approaching incoherence.

“Yeah,” says Kyle. “Umm I’d say that’s bullshit, Rank. It’s a little beside the point, but it’s bullshit, sure. What else do we think is bullshit? Adam, care to contribute?”

But Adam does not care to contribute because, as always, he is quicker on the uptake than Kyle, even with multiple shots of beer inside him. He gives Rank a wary look, sensing the change of atmosphere, as if the temperature in the room just dropped several abrupt and inexplicable degrees.

“Compact discs,” says Kyle, turning it into a game. “Digital music — all your albums are obsolete overnight, and you have to rebuild your entire collection. Total marketing scam. What else?”

Rank is just looking at Kyle and Adam is looking at Rank.

“Hot chicks who get fat,” continues Kyle around a swig. Adam suddenly leans forward. “You fuck em when they’re thin, and then they still expect you to wanna fuck em after they’re fat.”

“You know what, Kyle?” says Adam carefully.

“Like you’re not supposed to notice. Like our friend Tiny,” adds Kyle.

“Stand up,” says Rank.

“Rank,” says Adam.

“What?” says Kyle.

“Stand the fuck up,” says Rank, standing up himself.

Kyle takes Rank in for a moment.

“You,” he says, “are wasted, my friend.”

“
Stand. Up
,” says Rank.

Kyle jumps to his feet with a sudden, simian instinct, indignation taking shape on its heels. This is the Temple, after all — love, brotherhood, and so forth. This is
his
Temple, more to the point.

Press pause. Let’s compare. Needless to say Kyle, in terms of size, is not a grotesque like Rank. But he’s doing okay. He plays rugby. He works out, lifts weights; is broad-shouldered and muscularly compact at an even six feet.

Still, Rank looms over him rather nicely. Or, weaves over him, might be the more honest description. Looms and weaves.

Press play. Adam doesn’t exactly jump between them. He doesn’t have the physical presence to pull that one off. He stands off to the side exactly like a referee.

“Guys,” he says.

“What’s your problem, Rank?”

Oh and here it gets embarrassing. It just gets so cliché, so guy. Did Rank respond:
You’re my fuckin problem?
Yes he did. Did he give his buddy Kyle a shove by way of punctuation? Maybe a little one.

Kyle just stands there once he has regained his balance like he cannot freaking believe what is happening. This is Kyle Jarvis we’re talking about, founder and overseer of the Temple. Magic man. Loved by all. Soon to be elected student union president by a landslide.

“Rank,” says Adam. “You said you didn’t want to fight.”

“I don’t remember ever saying that.”

“In hockey. You fucking walked out because you didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

“That was different.”

“And now you’re drunk and pushing Kyle around.”

“Stay out of it Grix he can’t fucking hurt me,” declares Kyle in a gush of outrage and adrenalin.

But already Rank can feel those same chemicals draining out of him, as if there’s a siphon connecting him to Kyle who is currently swelling with them — who can barely keep himself from leaping on Rank in response to the shove.

Rank raises his hands and takes a step back.

“Oh, now you’re backing off?” exclaims Kyle, his voice seeming to climb in pitch with every word. “How about you back right the fuck out of here?”

“You are an asshole about women,” says Rank.

Kyle is speechless. He flails in disbelief. He too has sisters. His mother is a tenured professor of psychology at McGill and has brought him up to be enlightened. He is one of the only guys on campus who dares, and gets away with, calling himself a feminist. When the student newspaper published a bonehead op-ed criticizing Take Back the Night (the only salient point being: did the night really need reclaiming in a town where the streets got rolled up at 7 p.m.?), Kyle wrote a letter of opposition in support of, as he called them, his “marching sisters.”

You can see all this, these innumerable defences and justifications, jostling around behind his eyes as Kyle’s mouth moves, trying to figure out which one he should articulate first.

“You hit her,” says Rank.

“Who?” shrieks Kyle.

“The highland dancer.”

“Janine? I did not fucking hit Janine.”

“We all heard it. Adam heard it.”

They both look at Adam, who has nothing to say on this front one way or another. Rank has an urge to knock him over. Kyle puts his hands on his hips and leans toward them both.

“We. Were. Having.
Sex
.”

“It was a slap.”

“You’re gonna hear stuff, Rank, if you guys are gonna sit out here like perverts while I’m in there with a girl. It’s not always gonna be PG. Sorry.”

“It was a slap.”

“I’m not gonna do this,” says Kyle, suddenly in motion. He strides across the room and grabs his jacket. “I’m not gonna go into detail about this with you.” Which Rank finds ironic because under any other circumstances Kyle is happy to go into detail about this very thing. Kyle yanks his bookbag onto one shoulder. His ears glow red as if lit from within.

“You think I hit Janine — if you actually believe that’s something I’m capable of — I tell you what. Find her and ask her. Check her for bruises.”

Rank feels himself losing ground at the same time, and at approximately the same rate, as his anger drains. He hates it. He wants to keep this feeling of being in the right — of being on the verge of righting wrong through sheer force and intimidation. He can’t believe that Kyle is leaving, instead of staying and insisting that Rank leave instead, which would make sense. Through his amber fog, it penetrates Rank’s brain that Kyle can barely speak. That Kyle will either cry or punch him at any moment, and doesn’t know which, and is desperate to leave before they all can find out.

Rank doesn’t want to let it go — he’s not satisfied. Nothing about the confrontation has turned out the way he wanted. He’s about to say something else to Kyle — something that will probably tear them up as friends for good — but Kyle’s gone.

So he says it to Adam. “He treats them like whores.”

“No he doesn’t,” says Adam.

“I can’t believe you’re defending him.”

“Because he doesn’t,” says Adam, flopping back down onto the couch, exhausted from the tension. “He’s just a hound, Rank. He’s a player.”

“He’s a fucking sleaze.”

“He’s a
bit
of a sleaze,” Adam allows. “But he’s a good guy.”

Rank has ducked into the kitchen and returns in the process of cracking another forty of rye, the sight of which makes Adam groan.

“It’s like,” says Rank, trying to focus his brain. “During the whole Take Back the Night thing last month. There was that poster around campus about virgins and whores. How guys think women can only be one or the other. Remember that?”

Adam’s head is cradled against the top of the couch, and his eyes are closed. The dim light of the room hits his Adam’s apple in such a way as to make it seem enormous.
Adam’s apple
, thinks Rank.
Ha ha.
Adam looks as if he’s offering up his throat.

“It’s just because you’re Catholic,” he mutters, eyes still closed.

“What? What’s just because I’m Catholic?”

“The virgin/whore complex. The two Marys. Of course that’s going to resonate all over the place with you.”

“But it’s true, right?” insists Rank. “That’s what he thinks. My old man’s like that too. Virgins or whores, one or the other. Except Kyle thinks they’re all whores. It’s not a virgin/whore complex it’s a . . . whore/whore complex.”

Rank is suddenly pleased with himself. If he can’t right Kyle’s wrong with sheer force, he will do it with the persuasive force of his mind, which seems to be throwing up gems of remarkable lucidity all of a sudden. And he will apply that force to Adam, who for some reason has fallen neatly — in Rank’s perception — into the role of judge to whom Rank must appeal.

“That’s not what he thinks, Rank.”

Rank cannot believe he isn’t getting through to Adam. This argument is gold. The moment he spoke it, the truth of it seemed to sing in the air around his head as if someone had struck a tuning fork.

“It
is
what he thinks!”

“It’s what
you
think.”

Rank has poured them each a fresh shot of rye. Now he puts the bottle down and gapes.

“Adam,” he says. “Will you stop lying there with your eyes closed like you’re hoping someone comes along and cuts your throat?”

Adam’s eyes pop open and he raises his head.

“I do not,” says Rank, “have a whore/whore complex.”

“You have the opposite,” says Adam. And has the audacity to lean back and close his eyes again, resuming the exact same posture on the couch, his Adam’s apple towering.