Lost Between Houses
Dedicated to my editor, Dennis Lee
and
In memory of my extraordinary mother,
Virginia Logan Wolfe
T
HAT NIGHT
my mom took me to dinner at this French restaurant downtown. It was a cosy little place on a back street. The guy came over and spoke to her in English but she answered him in French, giving me a little look just to make sure I was listening. He took us to our usual perch on the second floor. I loved sitting up there, you could see the whole place, the people eating, the waiters gliding around, a pretty girl in the coat-check room. I raised my arm to get the waiter’s attention. “Don’t,” she whispered. “They have radar. The good ones.” Sure enough the guy, who had his back to us, looked around, saw my mother with her chin on her hand and hurried over. She ordered a martini.
“You know what I was thinking today?” she began. My mother loved getting all dressed up and going out and when she was happy, like she was tonight, she could talk the hind legs off a donkey.
“I was thinking that you should have a party. You’re sixteen and you’ve never had one. And I suddenly realized why.” She touched my hand just to make sure I was paying attention.
“You’re afraid, no,
afraid
is the wrong word, you’re nervous rather, that no one will come. I felt exactly the same way when I was your age. The
shame
of no one coming!”
Her martini arrived and she took a sip, giving it her absolute attention, like she was listening for a very faint sound from the other side of the city.
“Heaven,” she went on. “You know where they make marvellous martinis? Italy. There’s something about Italy that makes you want to have a martini.”
She lit a cigarette.
“So here’s what you do. You get all dressed up in your finery. You invite lots and lots of pretty girls, they inevitably give a party a sense of occasion, and you get your best friends to come early. People love parties. I’m not exaggerating, Simon, may God strike me dead, but it’s more fun
to give
a good party than to go to one.”
She reached over and grabbed her purse and opened it and pulled out her cheque book, flipped it open and extracted a narrow silver pen.
“Just for fun,” she said, “let’s draw up a list of all the people you’d invite if you
were
going to have a party.”
So the two of us sat there throwing down names on the side of the paper tablecloth. Very français that, the paper tablecloth.
The waiter came over.
“Vous avez décidé, Madame?”
“Non, pas encore. Mais dites, encore un, s’il vous plaît,” she said, pointing to her martini glass.
“Comme vous voulez, Madame.”
“You never say, un autre,” she whispered to me. “That means you want a
different
kind of drink. Now where were we? Shall we invite Daphne Gunn?”
“Ugh. No. Like over my dead body. Besides she looks like a fucking potato.”
She put her pen down. “Simon, that is absolutely intolerable.”
“All right, I’m sorry. But no, I hate her. She can’t come.”
“It would be very classy if you asked her. It would show that you’re
above the fray.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Do you ever speak to her?”
“No, never. It’s like she’s dead.”
“Well, it’s your party. That’s the thing about a party. You invite whomever you want. So we’ll put Daphne in the holding tank for the moment.”
“I should have those Catholic girls. They’re really pretty.”
“Oh yes, especially that tall one. She’s a stunner, that girl. What’s her name?”
“Anna.”
“Anna. Yes. What a beauty. Does she have a beau? They always have beaux, those girls.”
She sat back and did that thing she always did when she was having a good time, cupping her elbow in her hand and holding her cigarette just to the side of her face. She always did it just before she made some observation. “My God, Simon,” she said, “you have such blue eyes it just kills me.
Blueberry
blue.
And so on it went until finally the waiter was hanging around the table and we felt sort of compelled to order something to eat. That’s the thing with those French waiters. They can make you feel guilty about anything. They don’t have to say a word.
“So when you do want to have your
do?
” she said.
“Can we have it before the old man gets out of the hospital?”
It was like everything just sagged and I instantly had the feeling I’d done something wrong.
“That’s mean,” she said softly.
“I don’t mean it to be mean. It’s just more fun when he’s not around.”
The waiter came by. He took a saucer from the table, spotted a soiled serviette on the floor, picked it up and moved off.
“You’re right,” I said, “they
have
got radar.”
But she didn’t answer.
I didn’t want to wreck dinner, not with her all dressed up like that and the two of us normally such great company.
“Well
you
shouldn’t feel bad,” I said.
“Well I do. It makes me feel like I’ve been a bad parent.”
“You’ve been a great parent.”
She was silent.
“I mean it,” I said. “When I have kids I’m going to raise them exactly like you did.”
She gave me this quick look and I suddenly imagined her as a young girl, tall with big, handsome features.
“Really?” she said. “Do you really think I’ve done a good job?”
“I really do.”
“You’re sure?”
“You bet.”
She grabbed up her pack of cigarettes and shook one out.
“God, I’m terrible,” she said. “I feel like another martini. Would you think I was a terrible old drunk if I had another martini?”
Back home, I went straight up to the maid’s room. Well, it’s not the maid’s room any more. She got canned for butting her cigarettes out in the cat box. But since my Easter report card, I’d been getting sent up there every night to do my homework. It’s not a bad little spot really, canary yellow, very away from things. You can hear people coming up the stairs so nobody ever gets the drop on you. Especially my old man, who makes a big racket.
I was supposed to be doing my physics homework but there’s something about that textbook, something sinister about the cover that really got to me. Filled me with a kind of dread when I looked at it. I even dreamt about it: it’s the night before my final exam and I’m flipping through the book and I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen
any
of these pages before, all those diagrams of soup cans with the fucking arrows going every which-way, and I realize that I’m screwed, I’m going to flunk my whole year because in my school, if you fail even one subject, you go back to square one the next fall and all the little squirts who are shorter than you, well suddenly they’re sitting beside you in the same grade and all your friends are sitting at a different table for lunch, doing different stuff after school. I mean a complete nightmare, man.
So I pulled out
Scaramouche
and started reading it. This wasn’t a complete goof-off, it was on my English course and I’d just gotten to the part where he’s invented a new manoeuvre with his sword, I mean I just loved it, but I also knew I was getting way ahead of the class, I’d be finished a month early and then I’d probably flunk the test because I wouldn’t be able to remember anything that happened. Sometimes you just can’t win.
I heard Harper out in the hallway. He’s my brother, two years older than me, the good sheep of the family. Good marks (but not too good), good at sports, the whole business. But not an asshole, not a bully. I gave him a shout.
“Harper,” I said, “the old lady thinks I should have a party.”
He popped his head in the door.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Do you have any friends?”
“A couple.”
“Well there you go. Why don’t you invite that chick from Bishop Strachan. The one with the big tits. What’s her name?”
“Massey. Evelyn Massey.”
“I can’t believe she’s only fifteen.”
“Well, she is.”
“She reminds me of Marilyn Monroe. That little kid’s voice.”
“Yeah. Well she doesn’t really hang around with our crowd.”
“Now there’s a girl I’d like to submarine. You ever submarined anybody Simon?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I love it. I’d like to drink a glass of it.”
“Anyway.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” he said, once he got his mind off going down on Evelyn Massey.
“Having a party?”
“Yeah.”
“How come?”
“Well you
go
to them all the time, Simon. Might not be a bad idea to have one. That way people won’t think you’re a big fucking sponge.”
“Food for thought,” I said, and we both laughed.
“I’m going to watch TV,” he said.
“What’s on?”
“Fuck all.”
“Right.”
By the time I was ready for bed, I figured it was a pretty good idea, this party, I figured no sweat. It was even starting to seem like my own idea. I got into my pyjamas and brushed my teeth and looked at my profile about a hundred times in the mirror and then I came back into the bedroom. Plopped my retainer in
my mouth. It tasted a bit grungy, it’d been sitting in my drawer since the morning, but I dipped it in a glass of water and it freshened up just fine.
Harper was already in bed, listening to the radio.
“I think I’m going to do it,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said, not giving a shit.
“Maybe I will invite Evelyn Massey.” This time he wouldn’t bite.
“I got to listen to this.” It was a baseball game. I got into bed and flipped open a Beatles book, a glossy one. Harper turned out the light.
“Thanks,” I said.
He waited a second.
“Don’t mention it.”
All of which was cool except that I woke up at four in the morning, my heart jumping around. I was full of the most awful dread. I lay there blinking my eyes, trying to figure out what it was. Then I got it. It was the party. It was like the worst idea in the world, nobody would come, just three ugly chicks and I’d be left standing there, the laughing stock of the school. The party that nobody went to. Honestly, I just couldn’t imagine a worse fate. I lay there in the dark thinking what a shitty idea this party was, thinking of how to get out of it without looking totally pathetic. To make things worse, it didn’t look as black outside as it did a little while ago. I hate it when it gets light like that, the slow, depressing creep of grey across the sky, everything all dark and cosy and private and then the light steals it away, makes everything normal and flat again. I heard a dog bark at the end of the street, Mr Bluestein taking his mutt out. He did that every morning, five-thirty a.m., rain or shine. That’s it, I
thought, I’m fucked now. And assuming I was fucked, I fell sound asleep.
Funny thing is, when the alarm rang a few hours later I felt fine, not worried at all, the sun was out, it was a clear spring day. “Man, that was nuts,” I thought. So I headed off to school, thinking maybe I’d have the party after all.
By the time I got to the top of our street, I could hear the bell ring across the soccer field. That meant I had five minutes to get to my locker, dump my books in the hallway, and get to prayers. Sure was a bitch to start the day that way, all flustered and out of breath, shirt-tail hanging out of my pants, but you didn’t want to be late either because that meant you lined up outside Willie Orr’s office, he’d been teaching Latin there ever since they spoke it at the school, where you’d get a detention, no questions asked. I made it into my pew just in time, just as all the kids rose with a crash and the masters began their morning parade down the centre aisle, Fairy Flynn swaying back and forth on the organ. They mounted the platform, the headmaster stepped to the podium, we bowed our heads, I closed my eyes, and we said the Lord’s Prayer, some of the guys looking but not me, I was sort of afraid to get caught with my eyes open. We had just started the hymn when I noticed this British kid come skittering down the far aisle. He was holding the change in his pocket to stop it from rattling, sort of biting his lower lip, just to let the masters know he knew he was fucking things up by being so late. He was an English kid with a great accent, he sounded like the Queen. I didn’t know his name but we sort of nodded to each other in the halls. Truth is, I got a bit self-conscious around him, he seemed like a movie star, that accent and playing on the first cricket team, even though he was my age. I wondered if maybe I should invite him to the party. At least that’d give me something to talk to him about.
