Читать книгу Planet Reese - Cordelia Strube - Страница 8

The call display feature has robbed him of the element of surprise. Roberta is not picking up. He pictures her seeing his number and continuing on with her day, not to mention her sordid affair with the art student. They probably meet at lunch, fondle each other in the cafeteria, smother each other in the Ford Festiva. Disgusting.

He removes his wedding ring. Immediately his hand feels lost, unhinged. His thumb repeatedly reaches across his palm to feel for it. In its absence there is a white band of skin undamaged by the sun. The finger feels thinner, as though the ring functioned as a girdle. Perhaps now it will spread.

His bus swerves to avoid a small boy running after a ball. The bus driver curses while the father runs into the street and grabs the boy by the arm. “What the fuck did I just say? Are you deaf? If I have to tell you one more time you’re going to get my boot up your ass.”

Love your child! Reese wants to shout through the window, although he suspects his words would go unheeded. Love requires a loss of control, of power, something the shouting father would never surrender. Nor would Roberta. If she felt herself coming loose she would grab a wrench and tighten her bolts. Reese has watched her with their children, always hoping to see a connection between mother and child, the sense that they form a whole. But Roberta pulls back. She cannot tolerate weakness. When her children falter, she doesn’t listen but urges them onward, imagining that this is positive reinforcement. Her unyielding positive attitude has immobilized his children. They fear nothing more than appearing to be “negative” like their father. They tell their mother only the good, and harbour the bad deep in their souls.

When Roberta banished him from the bedroom, he slept on the futon in the basement where Clara would join him for snuggles. The warmth of her, the solid trust of her body gave him strength to go on. Clara would mutter in her sleep, and occasionally wake from a nightmare that Reese would ask her to describe. Often they involved witches and monsters with green hair but sometimes the “dead” dream would recur. In Clara’s dreams her parents were dead. “We’re not dead,” Reese would assure her, holding her closer. “We’re not going to die.”

“You said nobody knows when anybody’s going to die.”

“That’s true. But I have a strong feeling we’re not going to die in the near future.”

Unconvinced, Clara would continue to whimper quietly, reminding him of her mother before she took anti-depressants.

Roberta would find them in the morning, groggy on the futon. “You’re a big girl, Clara. Big girls don’t sleep with their daddies.” Roberta’s sociopathic mother, whom she loathes, has nevertheless succeeded in programming her daughter into believing that sleeping with children is detrimental to their mental health.

The bus halts in traffic. Beside him, Reese observes a newspaper being read by a sweating man. The headline “Husband Found Guilty in Axe Killing” catches his interest. Between the sweating man’s thumbs Reese reads that a stay-at-home-father, who took care of his three children, including a severely disabled daughter, picked up an axe and hit his wife in the head twice, stuffed her body in the trunk of her car, then dropped off the vehicle at Blockbuster Video. They’d been arguing in the garage when she revealed that she’d been having an affair with her bowling partner and wanted a divorce. She said that she would take the boys and that he could keep the severely disabled daughter. She threw tools at him, hit him with a hockey stick, and kicked him in the groin. In court, the husband admitted that he’d killed her but insisted that it was not premeditated. But the jury had no time for this.

If the wife had axed the husband because he’d been throwing tools at her, hitting her with a hockey stick, and kicking her in the groin, would she have been found guilty of murder?

Photos of the axe murderer and his wife show them both in part profile, heavy-lidded, smiling, showing teeth. Their noses are similar, as are their ears. What can this mean? That they grew to resemble each other and in so doing nurtured already well-established self-hatred? Did the mirror-imaging foster mutual loathing to the point that they had to throw hockey sticks at each other? Reese has never thrown things at Roberta, but an acquaintance whose cottage they visited two summers ago greeted them with the words, “It’s happened.”

“What?” Reese asked, disliking the man because he’d been a boyfriend of Roberta’s once.

“The transformation,” the cottager said, laughing heartily. “You look identical.”

Reese did not want to believe this but feared it was true. He and Roberta went to the same optician, same hairdresser, ate the same organic foods, drank the same reverse-osmosis water, walked the same hypoallergenic dog. The transformation was inevitable.

He knows the day will come when his daughter, like his son, will not allow herself to be cuddled by him. He does not know what he will do on this day.

Why are there so few storybooks involving loving fathers? Why is it always Mummy bunny who finds baby bunny? Why is it always Mama bear who tucks in baby bear? Occasionally Papa is portrayed as Mama’s assistant, doing the dishes and cooking meatballs, but rarely is he doing the intricate work of soothing the day’s pains, rarely is Daddy doing the kissing and hugging.

Reese sniffs his hands. They still smell of vomit. His father has fallen off the toilet.

“He was trying to transfer himself to his wheelchair,” Reese’s mother explains, scuttling up the stairs.

It’s been some time since Reese has seen their bathroom. The grime coating its formerly shiny surfaces alarms him. He kneels and tries to shift the bulk of his father.

“Bloody hell,” Bernie responds while Reese’s mother frets in the hall.

“He never even wears underwear anymore,” she complains. “It’s disgusting. Naked from the waist down. All day he sits in that La-Z-Boy eating croissants and Campbell’s soup made with cream and he asks why he’s fat.”

“The soup’s not the same,” his father grumbles into the bath-mat. “The fuckers’ve changed the soup.”

Reese pulls the hall rug into the bathroom and tries to roll Bernie onto it. “I can’t do this by myself, Dad, you’re going to have to help me here.” His father stinks because he no longer washes. Congestive heart disease has caused neuropathy in his hands, which makes it impossible to grip, to turn taps, open shampoo bottles or toothpaste tubes, put on pants.

“It’s like living with a homeless person,” his mother says. “Spill some liquor on him and you’d think he was a homeless person.”

“They usually wear pants,” Reese says. He begins to drag the rug with his father on it into the hall.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Bernie demands.

“To the stair glider.” “He doesn’t even shave anymore,” Betsy says. “I say, ‘Use the electric one, what’s so hard about that?’ But he waits too long. You try to shave now with the electric one and you’ll break it.”

“Who said I was going to shave?”

“Easy for you to say, I have to look at you all day.” “Stay in your room. She only comes out for booze anyway.”

Reese, experiencing twinges in his lower back, drags his father by inches.

“Did you get me my Crispy Crunches?” Betsy asks.

“Yes.” Reese has begun to buy them in bulk. At the top of the stairs he lifts his father’s legs, swollen with edema, onto the glider. He can’t avoid seeing the penis, sagging and purple, meaningless.

How do you know Lainie? Kyrl Dendekker e-mailed.

We were lovers.

She never mentioned you.

“The superintendent wants to rent the parking space,” Betsy says, “and even has a buyer for the car, but do you think your father will sell it?”

“You can’t drive the car, Dad.”

“It’s worth three thousand.”

“What’s he offering?”

“Six hundred,” Betsy says, “which we could use right now what with all the cab fares to the hospital.”

His father farts. “It’s worth three thousand.”

“It’s an old car, Dad.”

“It’s a good car. American, you can get your legs in it.”

“Ford Escorts aren’t exactly hot properties these days.”

“I’m not taking a penny less than three thousand.”

“That’s just unreasonable,” Betsy argues. “Reese, tell him that’s unreasonable.”

“You won’t get three thousand for it,” Reese says.

Betsy leans over Bernie in the stair glider. “Bernard? Are you listening, Bernard?”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

“You can’t drive it,” Betsy persists. “Meantime we’re paying for insurance and parking, does that seem intelligent to you?”

“She’s got a point, Dad. I mean, that’s costing you, what, a couple of hundred bucks a month or something?”

“Don’t use that tone with me,” Bernie says. “The two of you, always ganging up.”

“He won’t give that car up because it’s his manhood. All old men have to give up their cars, Bernard. He thinks he’s eighty-six going on twenty. You’re old, Bernard, and you have to go on dialysis or you’ll die. He won’t even listen to the doctors.”

“Let me die, then, if I’m old.”

“This is what I have to put up with, day and night. And he stinks. It’s embarrassing being seen with him.”

Bernie glides to the first floor where Reese waits with the wheelchair.

“Is there anything I can get you at the store?” Reese inquires.

“I have a list,” his mother says.

A woman in a hat is shouting at her dog. “Grow up! No other doggie on the street behaves like this. Do you see any other doggies on the street behaving like this?” Reese retrieves a shopping cart. Just once he would like to walk into a supermarket and not hear Karen Carpenter singing, “We’ve only just begun ...”

He looks at the list. The same as last week and the week before that: cream, bacon, butter, cold cuts, white bread, butter and lemon tarts, Ripples (sour cream and onion), canned peaches, cream cheese, pineapple juice, tonic water, Minute Rice, Campbell’s soup, croissants, butter pecan ice cream. Their diet would kill normal people.

Nobody offers to help him at the bed store. He lies on several beds in an effort to release neck tension. He tries different positions, different pillows. Looking up, he sees a sombre woman with a name tag that reads Mary Jane Lovering looking down at him.

“I need to buy a bed,” he says, uncomfortable at being viewed lying down by a woman standing up.

“That’s a Stearns & Foster queen,” she tells him. “Very popular.”

“It’s very springy.”

“You don’t like springy?”

He sits and bounces up and down. “Not particularly.”

“Try this one.” She points to an even bigger Stearns & Foster. He sits and checks the bounce factor.

“Less springy?” Mary Jane Lovering asks.

“A little.”

“That’s absolutely top-of-the-line.” She has narrow front teeth that angle inward, providing a flash of rodent.

“How much are these?” Reese inquires.

“With the pad you’re looking at five thousand.”

“Dollars?” Immediately he realizes how stupid this sounds. He had no idea that a bed could cost five thousand dollars. Clearly this is a quality bed, a bed that Roberta would envy. He could mention it in passing: “I slept great last night. That Stearns & Foster queen is top-of-the-line.” She would know that he bought a quality bed without her, and that it was a queen, which could only lead to more comfort and contented sleeping, a finer state of love with some unnamed woman, and an all-round happier, more productive life.

He had no intention of spending five thousand dollars on a bed. He doesn’t have five thousand dollars to spend.

“I can tell you’re not in love with it,” Mary Jane Lovering observes. “You’ve got to be in love with your bed.” She points to another bed. “The Shiffmans are manufactured more traditionally. They have an eight-way, hand-tied box spring and use only natural fibres.”

“Which are?”

“Compressed cotton and wool instead of synthetic foams. Try it.”

“Definitely less springy.” Natural fibres sound promising. He hasn’t really thought about synthetic foams, hasn’t really thought about what’s in a bed.

She pulls back the duvet. “Make yourself comfortable. It’s the only way to find out.”

He lies on his side and she pulls the covers over him, sending him back to boyhood, when Mummy had healing powers. Which must be why he wanted her after he killed the pigeon. Which must be why he wanted her after he killed Amir Kassam. Because Betsy, whose chain-smoking has destroyed her circulation, believes her son incapable of ill-doing. Even when she saw Reese’s Scout shirt smeared with pigeon blood, she believed that Dudley Dancey did it. Betsy’s beliefs are unshakeable. She considers the health warnings on cigarette cartons to be propaganda. A doctor recently cut off two of her toes and advised her that if she didn’t quit smoking he’d have to cut off her foot, maybe even amputate to the knee.

“Do you have any allergies?” Mary Jane Lovering inquires.

“No.”

She pats the Shiffman. “Then this might be the one for you.”

“It feels hard.”

“Hard?”

“I can feel my hip and shoulder pushing into it.”

“What is your current sleep system?”

“A futon.”

Mary Jane Lovering looks saddened for a moment, as though he’s just told her his dog died.

“Actually,” Reese clarifies, “before the futon I slept on a quality bed.”

“Do you remember the brand?”

“No. My wife bought it.”

“I see.” She averts her eyes, unable to meet the gaze of such a bottom feeder. “Why don’t I let you browse?”

“Thank you.” Losing conviction, he tries a Sealy with a pillow top, which smothers him. Mary Jane Lovering turns her attention to a young couple in corporate attire who lounge on the beds, together and individually. “How long will one of these things last?” the young husband asks.

“Forget how long it lasts,” the young wife interrupts, “we’ve got to get the bed that feels right, we can buy another one later.”

“If you buy a bed and don’t like it,” Mary Jane Lovering advises, “you can send it back within thirty days.”

“I already told him that,” the young wife says. “Sweetie, people send beds back all the time.” She reclines on the bigger Stearns & Foster and takes a call on her cell. The young husband lies beside her while she converses at length with someone else about what she received at her wedding. Will this be their life, on a succession of Stearns & Foster queens, talking on cellphones about recent acquisitions because they can’t talk to each other? Acquisitions and beds that will soon be on their way to landfill sites? Like Bernard and Betsy, once the children are grown or dead, will the corporate couple practise tolerance until bowel function becomes impossible to ignore? Is Reese’s marriage destined for such a fate? Is he genetically programmed to destroy relationships? Should he remain devoted to Elena who is dead and therefore unthreatening? Whenever he cooks a chicken he thinks of her. They bought the Romertoph together. “A clay pot?” he argued. “Do you know how much energy is required to heat a clay pot for two hours?”

“You’ll taste the difference,” she said coolly, handing the pot to the cashier.

And he did. The chicken was tender and juicy on the inside, crispy on the outside. They cooked many chickens together and ate them with their fingers then had greasy sex. Roberta still has Reese’s Romertoph. He must retrieve it. His daughter used to love the chicken he cooked in it. She used to say it was her favourite dinner. Who’s cooking her chickens now?

The Eezy-Rock radio news distracts him with news of a six-year-old girl’s abduction. She was dragged kicking and screaming from her grandmother’s front lawn. Her dead body has been found, naked and abused. Mary Jane Lovering and the corporate couple seem not to hear this. Reese knows the body is not his daughter’s because the abduction happened in Sudbury. Even so, the thought of the little girl’s suffering leaves him nauseated, angry, despairing.

He never knows where his children are anymore.

“No lawyer?!” bellows Sterling Green. “Are you out of your mind? It’s war, boyo. She’ll screw you unless you screw her first. Clean out your bank account, hide your assets, valuables, tax statements, cancelled cheques, diaries, debit and credit card receipts, anything she can use to establish a level of consumption that’ll justify a level of alimony. She’s probably photocopied stuff already, her and her lawyer are probably putting together a financial picture. And no way do you move out.”

“I already have.”

“Are you nuts? She’ll argue abandonment, which gives her claim to the house and everything in it.”

“It’s only a trial separation.”

Sterling eats more of his Double Whopper. “Wait till she starts talking to her lawyer.” He drinks more of his Coke. Everything about Sterling is more. He won’t settle for less. Reese didn’t want to work for Sterling, Sterling wanted him, thought he would bring credibility to his fundraising-without-morals operation. “You should have driven her out, I’m telling you.”

“It’s not like that,” Reese says. “It’s not adversarial.”

“It’s always adversarial, boyo. Even if it starts out niceynicey.” He drops an Alka-Seltzer into a glass of water. “And what’s with the wetlands people? They’re pished, won’t get off my ass about you.”

The “wetlands people” are gunmen posing as environmentalists because they want to hunt ducks.

“I took their leader out for a brew to cool his jets,” Sterling says, “and he got rat-arsed. I had to drive him home. For an environmentalist he’s got a pretty pristine lawn, even had one of those little pesticide signs on it.”

Reese nods understanding, as he always does, while reviewing results. He has 120 callers working part-time throughout the afternoons and evenings. The call centre seats fifty-two. Some of them barely speak English. They’re not supposed to eat at their booths but they do, stashing foreign foods in unlikely crevices. The dialler, a half-million-dollar refrigerator-sized computer, keeps them working non-stop. It is a thankless, repulsive job and only the desperate or truly naive can stand it, and even they never last. Staff shortages are constant. Serge Hollyduke, who supervises the callers, is a sadist and therefore effective at managing for-profit fundraising. They raise money for hospitals, advocacy groups of the right or left, child sponsorships, the Federation of Anglers & Hunters, any disease going, the Humane Society. When a caller’s performance is poor, Serge Hollyduke issues warnings and disciplinary notes before terminating them. But there is a pretty girl who has been exempt from his boot camp approach. After checking the data, Reese has no choice but to remind Serge of the response goal of 5 percent. “Has she hooked anybody?” he asks.

“She’s got a name,” Serge says. “Avril Leblanc. And she just started.” Serge has a new haircut, very short, revealing a bullet-shaped head.

“She’s been here three weeks,” Reese says, which is a considerable amount of time at such a repulsive job. “She’s spending a lot of time on the phone. What’s she talking about?”

“She makes them comfortable. They like her.”

Sterling takes a swig of Alka-Seltzer. “They just don’t cough up credit card numbers.”

Serge fondles the short hairs on his head. “I’ve got her chasing some lapsed donors. Just give her a chance.”

“Fess up,” Sterling says, “you get a boner looking at her. It won’t do, boyo. We’re not here to jack off.”

The arteries on Serge’s neck begin to bulge.

“Let’s reassess in a couple of days,” Reese suggests. “I’ve got mail to write.” He must come up with some shift incentives for the dwindling marketers; tickets to brainless events usually go over well. And he must talk to his client service people.

At the coffee station, Avril Leblanc spoons honey into her herbal tea. “Hey,” she says.

“Hello.” She smells of oranges. She’s probably been eating oranges at her booth, dripping juice, leaving sticky fingerprints.

“I’m really enjoying the job,” she says.

“Good.”

“I like talking to people.” She dribbles honey on the counter before licking the spoon.

“Good.”

He would like to slide his hand under her skirt. He would like to take her here, on the floor only vaguely dry-mopped by the night cleaners. He would like some distraction.