Mean Boy (31 page)

“This guy, this guy,” Jim ranted. “True enough, he may be the only man at Westcock worth sitting down and having
a drink with. But Jesus Christ, he’s a constant disappointment to me. A
constant
disappointment, Larry! Claiming to care about poetry. Avowing his desire to forge a new aesthetic, to set the present structure on its ear. It’s horseshit. When push to comes to shove, it’s a pile of shit! Bryant’s a good guy, yes, but if the best you can say of a man is he’s a ‘good guy,’ then, I’m sorry, but that’s no man at all, Larry.”

I was left with nothing to respond, since the protest I’d been about to make, that Dekker was “not that bad a guy,” now struck me as a bit flaccid. Plus, I was struck dumb at Jim’s vigour. He wasn’t even slurring anymore.

“Here is a man who has betrayed himself, his country, his background—who has left it all behind, and for what?
Tenure?”
Jim practically threw up the word. “At
Westcock?
A dull, unremarkable, medium-sized fish in an insignificant swamp of a pond like this? Little house on Duffrin Street? A pretentious cold fish of a wife?
This
is what has the guy paralyzed?
These
are the sumptuous rewards that keep him in his place, that muzzle him in the face of authority, of bourgeois morality?
Christmas trees?
Christmas trees? Oh yes, a man must have his Christmas trees. Above all else. Before art, before truth, before anything pure. For the love of God, don’t take away my Christmas tree. Don’t dare topple one of those expertly hung adornments. Don’t dare disrupt the facile joke of perfection you see before you …”

Weirdly, I could see Jim’s side of it. Even in the face of his irrational rage and the fact that I knew he had done Dekker wrong. Christmas trees
were
pretty insipid—Christmas itself was like that. And Dekker
was
kind of a wimp, he
did
have that air of fear and paralysis about him. And even though I understood and sympathized with it—and knew it existed in me as well—it seemed to me that the fact that I was young made it more excusable. I still had time to excavate it, to make myself more like Jim—more fearless, more willing to
sacrifice for what Jim called art, truth, anything pure. But Dekker was middle-aged. He was tenured, he was married, he probably wrote the kind of poetry no one ever knew about. Dekker was locked in. He had locked himself in—that’s what Jim found so contemptible.

I found I didn’t disagree with him.

Yet I defended Dekker to a point. I reminded Jim how Dekker had gotten behind him during the tenure dispute, written letters.
You stuck your neck out, Bryant
. As far as I knew, he was the only faculty member who did.

“Ah, Larry,” Jim sighed, flopping on my couch. We were in my apartment now, and Jim hadn’t even paused to look around, to comment on the surroundings, in which I took a kind of monastic pride. I’d shoved my typewriter aside and was using the desk for a bar—had set up a glass with ice for Jim and was opening the forty-ouncer we’d procured from the bootleggers. I had been kind of hoping Jim might comment on the typewriter. Its obvious centrality, its place of privilege in the window. But Jim was still going on about Dekker.

“Yes, he wrote letters, and that’s a huge deal for someone like Bryant, admittedly—going on the record. Which is why I appreciate it so much. But goddamnit, Larry, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be on both sides of the fence at once, and that’s what Bryant’s always striving for, that’s his goal—the middle, the lukewarm, unremarkable, morally ambiguous middle—and that’s what I can’t help but disrespect. You cannot have it both ways. Pick a side, for fuck’s sake. Pick a side and fight for it.”

I handed Jim his drink and ducked my head to glance at the kitchen clock. “So,” I said. “You want the couch or the bed? You’re welcome to either.”

Jim became still and scrutinized me. It was as if he had abruptly sucked in all the rage he’d been flinging around the
room a moment before and focused it on me in a single unnerving beam of intensity.

“Where’s your drink?” he wanted to know.

Feeling a sudden need to busy myself, I pulled my desk chair over and sat myself across from him. Maybe Jim would be inclined to stretch out if I gave him the couch to himself.

“I gotta catch the ferry early tomorrow,” I explained. “Christmas,” I rolled my eyes and shrugged so Jim would understand I had as much contempt for the holiday as he. “But you’re welcome to hang around here tomorrow as long as you like. As long as you don’t mind locking up.”

Jim stared at me a moment longer before slumping forward. My couch was low to the ground and sagged, so his entire upper body was practically between his knees. He dangled his head like someone fighting off nausea.

“Christmas,” he said into the floor. “S’posed to bring people together. Instead I watch my friends leave me, one by one.”

“Hey, Jim,” I said, alarmed. “I’ll only be gone a few days, you know? I put it off as long as I could … You know how parents are about Christmas.”

Jim looked up at me, body still dangling.

“I find it oppressive,” he confided, blinking his black, wet eyes. “I find it a particularly oppressive holiday for some reason.”

“Oh yeah, me too,” I assured him.

“Get yourself a drink, Larry,” he told me, talking to the floor again.

“I better not, Jim, I have to get up at seven.”

“I said, get yourself a fucking drink!”

There were tears in his voice. I reached spasmodically for the rum from off my desk. When Jim raised his head to look at me, I uncapped it and showed it to him. He kept looking, so I took a swig. He didn’t stop looking until I took three more. Once I did, he allowed himself to blink.

“Ah, kid.” He knuckled the corners of his eyes like a weepy child. “I’m falling apart, I think.”

I leaned closer. “Jim, you’re not. You’ve had a few too many. We all get a little mopey.”

“I don’t know …” Jim shook his head. His voice had broken again, choking off any other words. In fact, he looked very much as if he
was
falling apart. Falling apart right in front of me.

“Jim,” I said again, after a moment or two. Giving myself just enough time to register my own awe and fear at the situation—
Jim Arsenault on my couch. Jim Arsenault crying on my couch
. The weirdness of it prickling my skin like salt water beginning to dry.

“Jim,” I repeated, not knowing what I could possibly say to make things better. “Don’t drink,” is what I said. “Don’t have any more to drink, okay?”

In response, Jim reached between his legs for the drink he had placed on the floor and took a loud, slurpy sip.

“I’m all right, Larry,” he assured me, putting it down again.

“No, but Jim, I really think it makes things worse. I think it makes things seem a lot worse than they are.”

Jim peered up at me. “I don’t see how that’s possible, frankly.”

“I think you’ll feel better after you get some sleep.”

“And so you’re telling me,” said Jim, “it’s all in my head.”

“No, no.”

“You’re saying I’m imagining all this. That I’m under constant siege from the powers that be. That my friends are so busy covering their own asses they don’t dare get behind me all the way. One moment they’re there, the next—poof. Off lickin’ Bob Sparrow’s behind lest he question their loyalty.”

This struck me as horrifically unfair and horrifically true all at once. I remembered myself sweating and smiling on the other side of Sparrow’s desk.

“Jim—you know—we’re all in the same boat,” I floundered. “Everyone’s position is—is tenuous …”

Jim straightened, seeming to grow bigger. “That’s right, we’re all in the same boat and nobody wants to be seen to be rocking it, do they?”

“It’s not that, it’s just—”

“Ah, Jesus Christ, look at you, Larry. Look at you flailing around trying to justify plain human cowardice.”

I made a conscious effort to reign myself in at that point—to cease any involuntary flailing I might have been doing.

“I’m just trying to explain. You have to see it from—from someone like Dekker’s point of view.”

“I do goddamn see it from Dekker’s point of view, I see it from everybody’s point of view. I’m the one that’s under attack, I’m the one bearing the full brunt of university censure, and everyone around me is terrified they’ll be next. Terrified of getting too close and being contaminated. And yet at the same time—”

Then Jim moved closer to me, sidling across the couch on his butt, and suddenly smiling with a grotesque lack of humour.

“At the same time, though, you wanna be close-close-close, dontcha, Larry? ‘Cause that raising-shit quality of mine, that’s part of the magic, isn’t it? And you all wanna get close to the magic, you’re all hoping just a little bit of that magic is gonna rub off. But oh, Jesus, not too much though. Jesus Christ, no. Too much and it might start carrying over into our mundane, day-to-day lives, right? Might unsettle things. Too much and the idols might start wobbling on their altars, yeah? And we can’t have that, now, can we, Larry?”

I swallowed. “I don’t think that’s fair.”

Jim settled back into the couch, watching me, still smiling.

“I getcha angry, Larry? Little pissed off now?”

“I just don’t think you’re being fair to me.” My face, I could feel, was burning, and so to distract us both from this I took a swig of rum, which caused it to burn even brighter.

“You don’t think I’m being fair,” considered Jim. “Let’s see, now—fair. What would it be fair to say about young Larry?”

Something in my stomach clenched as Jim inclined his head, pretending to consider.

“Jim,” I pleaded, feeling myself begin to babble in the panic to keep him from saying the next thing. “I’ve been, I’ve been nothing but loyal. I’ve supported you from day one, I—”

“And so where are you going?” Jim demanded, jerking forward.

I blinked. “What?”

“Where are you going, my dearest and truest of friends? Tomorrow,” said Jim. “Tomorrow
A.M.”

We stared at each other.

“Home,” I said after a moment.

“Home,” he spat back. “Home for the holidays.”

“Like,” I said, “tomorrow is the twentieth. It’s practically Christmas.”

“Christmas,” repeated Jim as though the word were coated in slime. “Eat some turkey. See your folks. And meanwhile, I’m alone. Always left alone, when it really counts. So that’s your idea of loyalty, is it, Larry? As long as it doesn’t spoil your
Christmas.”

Jim dangled forward again, turning all his attention to the drink between his feet. I sat there, blinking and processing. Perplexity wrestling with a kind of perverse thrill. That Jim should want me to stay. That he should need me that much. That my friendship was so important to him, it made him angry I would go away, even for a handful of days. It made him kind of nasty even. And here’s where the perversity
really kicked in: this joy that Jim should care so much about me as to prove it with abuse—with outright hostility.

And yet of course it was ridiculous.

“Jim, for God’s sake. It’s like a week. I’ll be gone a week.”

“I understand, Larry,” Jim said around his drink. “Gotta get that Christmas turkey. Gotta getcher presents from Mom and Dad, wha?”

“It’s not that Jim, it’s just—it’s a break. I just need a break.”

I felt the truth of it very strongly at this particular point in time. I needed a break—from everything—badly. Fatigue washed over me. I stood and stretched. Jim didn’t look up.

“Off to bed, are we, Larry? Gotta catch that ferry, eh?”

“I think we should both get some sleep.”

I stood there, looking down at Jim, waiting for a movement, an appeasing flicker of the eye. If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have kept waiting for it. I would have sat again and tried to reason with him, I assured myself. I would have stayed up all night if I could. But the booze was dragging at my blood, and the tension of our exchange made me feel like I had swum the Northumberland.

Plus—I was feeling
it
. For the first time ever. The need to self-preserve. The need to get away from Jim and his mood. It was stronger than anything else—any guilt, any imperative to prove myself—and I knew I would find myself making all and any excuses to indulge it.

“You can have the bed,” I offered brightly. “You’re welcome to the bed.”

Jim shook his head and waved me off.

I let myself be waved.

To think I could have saved myself (and Mrs. Dacey!) all that time, all those words. From now on, Keats goes wherever I do. I’ll underline the pertinent passages and have them ready to read out when I get stuck. I often get stuck.

Best wishes,

Dermot Schofield

So Keats was obsessed with it too, that word. It seems to crop up a lot lately. The word I am not.

AT THE HUMPHRIESES
, as Lydia repeatedly wheezed
Nonsense!
and Maud shrieked and yelled and Uncle Stan made himself a forlorn lump shaking his head back and forth while the radio pleaded for a silent, holy night, Janet had at some point interjected the words, “I am going to New York! I will eat as much dessert as I want!”