Mean Boy (2 page)

Jim sighs and unwinds his arms from his head. Claude says, “Hmm,” because that’s what he says after everybody’s poem. A couple of people echo the noise. It’s a good, safe noise to make.

Sherrie looks flushed. Her hands were shaking when she was reading. It’s kind of an awful thing to do to people, make them read their poems out loud.

Jim says, “Comments?” and I jump at this, because I have a feeling Claude might have clued in on the metaphorical orgasm as well.

“I liked the orgasm,” I say.

Jim smiles at me. Sherrie’s mouth falls open, her blue eyes expand.

“Pardon, Larry?”

“The
metaphorical
orgasm, I mean. At the end.”

“That’s usually where you’d find it,” quips Claude. I look to Jim for help.

Jim smiles wider. “You liked that, did you?”

“No,” I say quickly. There is a distinct shift in Sherrie’s posture at this. “I was
intrigued
by it, is what I meant to say. I found it intriguing.”

“Why?” says Jim.

Oh my God. Why. Why.

I shrug.

That’s no good, I can’t just shrug, I’m not in high school.

I say, “Well, you know, just within the context of the rest of the poem. I thought it was kind of … well, on the one hand, I guess it was inevitable …?” There goes my voice again, upward, questioning, looking directly at Jim for validation.

“Was it?” says Jim.

“Well,” I grin and spread my hands, armpits like a swamp. “I’m no doctor, but …” Somebody cuts me off, and I’m glad, until I realize that it’s Claude.

“Isn’t that a bit if a … masculine viewpoint?”

Oh, I can’t believe it. I had hoped to regroup and regain my composure while everyone else weighed in, but there’s no way he’s getting away with that.

“I would argue that it’s merely archetypal?” I hear myself say. A salient, insightful retort, utterly destroyed by the question mark at the end. I’m disgusted with everything that question mark gives away. Approve me, agree with me.

“What about the other hand?” asks Jim, looking at me.

“What?” What in God’s name is he talking about?

“You said, on the one hand, it’s inevitable …,” he prompts, “before Claude interrupted you.”

Vindication! I glance over to see if Claude is hanging his head in shame, but he doesn’t seem fazed. He never speaks with question marks, not even when he’s asking questions. It’s because of that Acadian accent of his—he punctuates everything with certainty.

“Larry?” says Jim.

I introduced myself to him as Lawrence. I sign all my poems Lawrence. He has never called me anything but Larry.

“On the one hand, it’s inevitable,” I say, carefully modulating my speech and trying to remember my original point.
Clichéd
. No.
Apropos. Apropos!
I sit up.

“But on the other hand …” I deepen my voice. “I think maybe it’s a little
too
inevitable, if you catch my meaning … This is why I didn’t appreciate Claude’s ‘particularly masculine’ comment—I didn’t think that was apropos, because he didn’t let me finish my point.”

Oh goddamnit. I start to sweat again, having jumped the gun and sabotaged my entire argument. “On the other hand,” I push on, “it’s so inevitable as to be … a little too … clichéd.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Sherrie’s posture shift again. I’m afraid to look at her.

“I think that’s a little harsh,” remarks Claude.

“Hm,” says Jim, nodding.

Students have been known to hang themselves at Westcock University. The stairwell in the English Department has been a preferred spot for decades.

Everybody waits in pure, frozen silence while Jim nods away and twists back into his rabbit-ears position, like he’s giving himself antennae. We all know it’s his thinking posture. It seems like if you stuck a pin in Sherrie, she would pop like a balloon right now.

After this particular eternity he lowers his arms. “I like,”
he begins. Yes, yes? Everyone seems to grow an inch taller in their seats. The metaphorical orgasm? The non-metaphorical orgasm? My poem’s better than Sherrie’s? Me better than Claude?

“Alfred Hitchcock movies,” says Jim.

And he spends the rest of the meeting telling us all about
North by Northwest
. After ten minutes or so, Sherrie realizes she may as well sit back down.

But I can’t hang myself in the stairwell, it’s been done. Done to death. Me being derivative again, like with my writing. Everyone in the program knows about the first to do it, the inaugural suicide. A lit major hung herself just outside the department doors—one of the first women students the college had admitted. She’d been expelled, for reading “pornography.” John Donne, to be specific. Probably that one about the sun—the “saucy wretch”—coming in through the window and waking up him and his girlfriend. Hot stuff.

I always thought it was so great, so literary, the story of the hanging. There is a plaque in the corridor describing it. I love this about my university, this Gothic little history it has, so European, people killing themselves over poetry.

I’m reading in the lounge—I also love the English Department lounge, big and oaken, with creaking wooden floors—musty with the past. The English Department is on the top floor of the Humanities building, the oldest building on campus. The chairs themselves belong in a museum—you should see them. Plush, balding velvet. Leather-bound books laid on the sturdy oak table. Coffee-cup rings, scratches, graffiti dating from the turn of the century. I could live here. I could die here.

The one nod to the present is a high-tech automatic coffee machine placed discreetly in the corner atop an Edwardian
end table. I lounge around reading and smelling the stale coffee for hours, soaking everything up, caffeine stench and history, hoping—let’s be honest—Jim might lope by, happen to glance in, smile his recognition—
Ah. Lawrence
.

If it sounds pathetic, it is not. I came here for him, after all. He is practically the only great poet I know of who’s alive. In this country, I mean. He’s the only one to learn from—and he’s here, for God’s sake, in the same town, school, department as me. Sometimes I can’t believe it. It’s like being able to call up Shakespeare on the phone.

I get light-headed thinking about it—with joy, and the conviction of my unbelievable luck, and, let’s face it, a real sense of predestination. Because something like this can’t be an accident, can it? Poetic genius Jim Arsenault arriving on one side of the Northumberland Strait, poetic aspirant Lawrence Campbell growing up on the other? This is the stars in alignment.

And on this day, the thing I’ve been waiting for happens—if not quite how I have imagined. I hear noises down the hall. The echoes in this place, it’s obscene. You imagine people must have never raised their voices above a whisper around the turn of the century. It’s as if the acoustics were deliberately engineered to keep you hushed.

Jim shouts,
Arsenault!
Which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe he’s writing in his office. But he’s never in his office—you’re lucky to catch him there even during posted hours.

 … goddamn Arsenault!

I envision him shouting into a mirror, overwrought with his latest effort, suffused with self-loathing, disgusted by the certainty of his own inadequacy to the sacred task of poetry. Oh, Jim, I know. Come talk to me. We’re of one heart, you and I.

But there’s another voice. He’s not in front of a mirror after all.

Jim, rumble rumble. Please rumble you rumble rumble rumble. All right? Rumble?

That voice is Doctor Robert A. Sparrow, department head.

Jim shouts his last name again, only I realize it hasn’t been his last name at all.

Echoes, echoes, thundering through the hallway. Footfalls—it’s very dramatic. Like a movie. I realize I’m just standing in the middle of the lounge. At some point I’ve risen from the green ottoman with velvet trim, my favourite place to read. I’m just standing here with my jaw dangling and my book dangling from my fingers when Jim appears in the doorway. The book? Of course it’s
Blinding White
. Poems by Jim Arsenault.

The thing about Jim is, he’s a man. More than that—a guy. He is the new breed of poet. He doesn’t fluff himself up, doesn’t wear jewellery or turtlenecks. Not like Claude. Claude is still very much in the turtleneck phase. Jim doesn’t even wear sports jackets, let alone a tie. Work shirts and jeans. Often he comes to class “straight from the woods,” he tells us. He’s big on the woods. Or “straight from working on my roof.” Or his porch.

So when Jim’s angry, he’s angry. His face is almost purple, which makes me think of Donne again, “purpling” his fingernail in the blood of a squished bug. Jim catches sight of me out of the corner of his eye as he’s clomping past, and spins around looking just goddamn furious. Like I’ve been standing here laughing at him or giving him the finger. His face looks like he’s about to take two fast, long strides forward, lean in, and swallow my head.

He doesn’t move, though—he just stands there.

He yells at me, “No wonder she killed herself!”

Jim is addressing me in the midst of a crisis. I am the one he has turned to. True, I’m the only one here, but clearly he’s
identified me as a sympathetic presence. He knows that I’m
with
him, I’m on his side, that there’s us and them and I am
us
.

“Oh … hi,” I say, “… there, Jim.”

“She didn’t kill herself,” Jim hollers. “This place. This
place
is what killed her.”

Jim tornadoes into the room at this point, heading straight for the green ottoman. And he kicks it. He kicks the couch.

“I think it’s antique …,” I start to say.

“It’s not about writing, it’s about
lit-ret-chaw
. It’s not about teaching, it’s about dogma. It’s about this fucking Victorian
bullshit.”
He kicks the couch again. “Doctrine!” he says. “Sophistry!” Another kick.

And then what I’m afraid of occurs. The ottoman collapses. One of its dainty carved feet buckles under. The balance thrown off, another carved foot gives out, this time in the opposite direction. The couch slouches over onto its frame.

This furniture, every English undergraduate knows, was a gift from Westcock’s founding family. No other department is decked out like ours. The university started out as a humanities institution, but it was
lit-ret-chaw
that always held a special place in the heart of Horace Lee Grayson. So back in 1935 the Graysons gifted us with furniture from Horace Lee’s own sitting room—or one of his sitting rooms. In our founding father’s mansion—which squats overlooking the duck pond, huge and white like one of the swans that live below it—there are many rooms.

My instinct for some reason is to kneel before the slain ottoman. I repress this instinct in front of Jim.

“Jeez …”

Before I can really get caught up in the power of my own eloquence, Jim Arsenault has me by the shoulders. He shakes me hard, once. It’s kind of wonderful.

What a pretty day. Long shadows of October filtering through the crimson leaves as Lawrence Campbell and Jim Arsenault make their way across the quad to raise a pint in poetic solidarity. I suggest going somewhere off campus, but Jim is having none of it. Jim is in a hurry.

I check my watch, mentally girding myself. It’s four in the afternoon, and I’ve last eaten at around one. It was a big meal, because I’d skipped breakfast—one of those enormous submarine sandwiches you can get across the street from Carl’s Tearoom for under a buck. It was an all-meater. Turkey, pastrami. What else was in there? I think bologna. The point is, I have food in my stomach. I intend to drink whatever amount Jim Arsenault expects of me. I am in it for the long haul.

Jim’s talking, and I should really be listening, but the thing is, I’m an awful drinker—I’ve got to plan this out if I’m going to keep up. There’s no way I can have a glass of water at the table, but maybe whenever I duck to the bathroom I can lean over the sink and just suck up as much as possible from the tap. Aspirin would come in handy, too, and as luck would have it there’s a convenience store right across from Franklin’s Stein, the dumb-named student pub. I can say I’m buying smokes. I don’t smoke. But Jim smokes—he lights up in class sometimes.

I can do this. You and me, Jim.

“Are you married?”

“Of course,” answers Jim, flicking his cigarette as if I’ve asked, “Do you like books?” “She’s my obsession,” he adds.
He says it absently, though, not really the way you would expect a man to say someone is his obsession.

He takes a sip of beer, I take a sip of beer. My goal is to match him pint for pint.

“Why the fuck do you ask me that?” he demands a moment later. Jim curses a lot. Never in class, but all the time in conversation. In his poetry, too—very controversial in this country. You’d think cummings or Ginsberg never even existed.

“Because,” I start to answer, and then I stop. The reason I asked was because Jim has been complaining about women for the past twenty minutes.

“I love women,” Jim declares, intuiting what I was thinking. “I love my fucking wife.” Jim takes another moody sip; I take one too. He has been talking non-stop ever since we sat down.

“I have nothing against women in the classroom,” Jim tells me.

I try to jump in. “Well, of course not, but—”

“But that sack of shit Sparrow thinks we should coddle them. That’s what’s sexist, if I may partake of the new vernacular.”

I’m surprised to hear Jim partaking of the new vernacular.

“I mean, for Christ’s sake, Sparrow would have us return to the days of segregated education. By ‘segregated’ I mean, of course, some for the pampered sons of pampered sons, none for anyone else. But God save us from the English boy’s school ethos, those bastions of so-called masculinity.” Jim smirks, sips. I smirk, sip.

Then Jim has a thought in mid-sip and sprays much of it onto the table. “There’s no turning back the clock!” he exclaims. “It’s time for them to stand up for themselves, they can’t just go running to Daddy whenever they hear something that isn’t nice.”