The Ravine (8 page)

Not everybody in the theatre, but the three of us certainly, we erupted into blubbery tears. I knew we were not weeping for the clergyman’s huge self-sacrifice, not exclusively. We were weeping because this selfless act on his part (this bit of cheap melodrama, when you get right down to it, after which Mungo summarily shot Chester Nipes through the heart) allowed us to. We were weeping, finally, for our own rankerdom.

In some strange way, I saw suddenly the trajectory of a man’s life, of
my
life; how, lacking the courage to do anything remotely close to what Father White had just done, I would end up wallowing in besotted loneliness.

And here I am.

“Hello?”

“McQuigge here.”

“Phil?”

“Yeah,
but
do not call me
Phil
, because this is not a social call. How are you, anyway?”

“First-rate.”

“Okay, great, but never mind about that right now. I want to take issue with the phrase
rose above the mediocrity of the material.”

“I’m not with you, Phil.”

“In the obituary. Ed Milligan’s obituary.”

“Ah. Wrote that, did I?”

“I think you even said
consistently. Consistently rose above the mediocrity of the material.”

“I see. And you’ve been brooding about it for all these months.”

“No. Yes.”

“And which aspect of the phrase in particular are you taking issue with, Phil? Milligan’s rising above or the mediocrity of the material?”

“What do
you
think?”

“For starters, I think you’re drunk. And I think your relationship with Milligan was complicated, that you resented his stardom. And lastly, I think you know that
Padre
was a mediocre program.”

“Really.”

“Don’t feel badly. Almost everything on television is mediocre.”

“And what, precisely, is so mediocre about
Padre?”

“I’ll tell you what’s mediocre about it, Philip. Here’s the thing. The writing is actually quite good. Sometimes, especially when
you’re
writing it, there’s very good dialogue. Clever stuff. And I appreciate the plot twists, don’t think I don’t. Often I’m reminded of your man Serling.”

“Oh, you and I have discussed Rod Serling?”

“Philip. We came to blows in Banff whilst discussing Rod Serling. At least, you did.”

“Ah, yes. Now I remember.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Carry on. You like a lot about
Padre
, despite which, it remains, in your view, mediocre.”

“Here’s the thing. Sometimes the show seems like it was created and written by a prepubescent boy. And it’s not just that the women are either virtuous or slatternly. Although there is that. But the show exhibits a very immature, a very unexamined, world view. It’s a black-hat white-hat show, Philip. And you’re far more intelligent than that. Now, I know what you’re going to say, that it is mere entertainment. But that would be disingenuous on your part. The show purports to be dealing with questions of good and evil, and its failure to do so consigns it to the bin marked
mediocre.
Milligan—who was neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but managed, as we know, to be both in grand measure—at least shaded things slightly. Lent the proceedings some ambiguity. And in doing so rose above the mediocrity of the material.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Are you working on anything now, Philip? I could mention it in my column.”

“Thanks, man, but I’m out of the television business.”

I LIVE IN A BASEMENT APARTMENT, COMPRISING A KITCHENETTE, A
bedroomette and a sittingroomette. I could afford more spacious lodgings; I did, after all, labour long in the fields of television, which my colleague William Beckett once described as a “river of money into which we must jump.” (Beckett was my Hermes into the land of television. He took great glee in, and I quote faithfully, “turning a promising young dramatist into a hack.” He didn’t know, because I never told him, that it was a land into which I’d always wanted to travel, having been seduced, at a very young age, when I heard those words, “You are entering another dimension of time and space.”) But my prospects of future income are very dim, so I rent this basement apartment, from a man who was once my employee. Michelangelo Barker was a junior writer on
Padre.
Every script Barker submitted I performed a page-one rewrite on, not that they were all that bad, and likely because they were much too good. Barker didn’t accept this well, and often, when I passed him in the hallway, he bristled with artistic indignation. “Stout lad,” I always thought.

Michelangelo is an imposing figure, six foot seven or something. Much of his size is concentrated in his legs and feet; he seems always to be shot from a low angle. His head is small, encircled by a nap of
golden hair, for he wears his hair buzzed short and has cultivated a moustacheless chinstrap for adornment. He wears tiny glasses, the lenses smaller than the glaring eyeballs they serve. Michelangelo lacks shoulders—God just forgot about them. He has a narrow chest, a belly created by a bad diet and endless video rentals, then those legs blast onto the scene, massive thighs, inhuman shins and monumental feet. So he was a hard man to sneak past, as he stood there sipping tea in the hallway outside the kitchen. He was in that position far more often than he was inside the closet I’d assigned him as an office.

So I’d nod at him and he’d bristle, and sometimes I’d stop and say, “That was a great script. There were just a few little problems.”

“Like what?” Michelangelo’s voice is very high-pitched and seems to come from someplace other than his mouth.

“Well,” I say, “Padre knows that O’Grady is really the cattle thief because he compares the
typewritten
letters. But they didn’t have typewriters in 1880.”

“Yes, they did.”

“They did?”

“Certainly. Although they had not standardized the keyboard. Many preferred the Dvorak arrangement. Indeed, Mark Twain invested heavily in the Dvorak, and lost much. Ironically, the man who possesses the title of world’s fastest typist—and yes, it is a man, a soldier in point of fact—employs a Dvorak keyboard. Hmm.” He always adds those little
hmms
at the end of his sentences, impressed with whatever he’s just said.

“Okay, fine, maybe they had typewriters in 1880, but they had like
two
, and it is just not an effective narrative device.”

“I see. Fine.” Michelangelo Barker, like everyone else on staff, is paid, and paid well, to be deferential.

Despite my past treatment of him, he is a very kind landlord. He is respectful of my privacy down there in his basement, although I
suppose I send up enough sozzled ululations that he ’d be a fool not to be. He often effects home improvements on his own initiative, trying to make my life a little more comfy. Michelangelo can’t stand erect in the basement and is constantly bumping his head on the ceiling, which makes his handyman stuff all the more endearing.

Barker is the only person, other than my children, who has ever been down in my basement. So it’s time to introduce the girls, even though you’ve missed them, I’ve dropped them off at their schools this morning, kissed them goodbye, and it will be a week or so before I see them again.

Currer is twelve and Ellis is seven.

I maintain that it is simply a linguistic anomaly that Currer is not a teenager, that there is no logical reason why we say “twelve” and not “two-teen.” Because she certainly acts like a teenager; she is withdrawn and a bit sullen (except with her friends) and takes an enormous amount of time to perform even the simplest task. Currer is not without sweetness; if there is trouble or sadness she is quick with a comforting hug and a whispered “I love you.” But left to her own devices, she would rather drift around the planet with earphones plugged in, dexterously manipulating the buttons on her portable music player, getting the machine to repeat favourite tracks and to avoid ones that fail to meet her standards. Her music of choice is, quite frankly, dreck, but this is an age-old generational battle, and needn’t be gotten into here. Currer does, I will say in her defence, adore the music of her Uncle Jay. We have gone to see Jay play on a few occasions, mostly when the owners of Birds of a Feather have ordered him to do matinees. Currer has sat stone-still for the entire performance, nursing a Coca-Cola, a look of rapture on her face.

Ellis has been to those same matinees, of course. She is not enthralled by her uncle’s music, although on the few occasions when
she knows the tune—“Over the Rainbow,” for example—she will sing along with ear-splitting enthusiasm. Curiously, seeing as many of the people in my family are musical—my mother had her grade eight piano and a lovely voice—Ellis appears to be singing-impaired. She hollers out notes at random, or with a profound attraction to quarter-tones. She is quite good, though, on the more showbizzy aspects of singing, twisting her body with rhythmic abandon and occasionally calling out, “Everybody!” When she does this, of course, everybody obediently joins in.

Currer has a lovely voice, although she is loath to use it. Currer will sing—with Ellis’s encouragement—at bedtime, when our custom is to belt out a rousing version of “The Window.” I know, because I used to overhear it (standing outside the doorway with my heart banging inside my ribcage), that their mother sings them actual lullabies, quiet serenades, even the occasional hymn. So the girls are used to music after they’ve scurried under the sheets, although “The Window” is hardly a peaceful air. I take up the banjo from its position in a shadowy corner and thrum out a few introductory changes. I don’t know how it is that I can play the banjo, but somewhere along the line I acquired a few chords and a rudimentary strumming technique. “The Window” is not that complicated a song, at any rate, and is boisterous enough to forgive all sorts of mispickings. I learned “The Window” from a record by a group named Troutfishing in America. It is a long song wherein a number of well-known nursery rhymes are recited, except that at the end of each there is the same sharp, stinging departure, which has to do with violent defenestration:

Currer sings with the tranquil intensity of a chorister; Ellis hollers like a drunken lumberjack in the advanced throes of cabin fever. She is so unmusical that I would suspect Ronnie of infidelity, except that Ellis is clearly my child; the tips of her little fingers are bent inward and her eyes are brown and very weak, so that she, too, is saddled with spectacles. Besides which, I don’t believe Ronnie was ever unfaithful during our marriage, so it’s unfair to raise the accusation even in jest. (Don’t think it has escaped my attention that Veronica has popped up twice in the past couple of paragraphs. She is certainly banging on the door of this narrative.) So I attribute Ellis’s lack of musicality to some genetic throwback. I will say this, though—Ellis can dance. She takes all sorts of lessons—ballet, jazz, tap and Scottish—competing in those disciplines that allow it (Scottish dancing is a highly competitive affair), performing whenever she gets the chance. She is a sturdily made little beast, with legs that would look more at home on a steroid-riddled sprinter. She inherited this tendency toward muscularity from her mother, Veronica, and I guess I can put this off no longer.

I’m going to write about Ronnie.

“Do you want me to talk sexy, baby, or do you want to talk sexy to me?”