Stone Mattress (12 page)

For Tin, the anecdotal family humour has long ceased to be amusing. Their mother died early, and not in a good way. Not that anyone dies in a good way, Tin footnotes to himself, but there are degrees. Being hit by a truck after closing time while jaywalking blinded with mournful tears was not a good way.
Though it was quick. And it meant that their life was free of the oafs and thugs by the time they went to university.
Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono
, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Two of the oafs had the nerve to come to the funeral, which may explain Jorrie’s fixation on funerals. She still feels she shouldn’t have let those assholes get away with it: turning up at the grave side, pretending to be sad, telling the twins what a fine and kind-hearted woman their mother had been, what a good friend. “Friend, like shit! All they wanted was an easy lay!” she’d raged. She ought to have called them on it; she ought to have made a scene. Punched them in the nose.

Tin’s view is that maybe these men really were sad. Is it so out of the question that they could actually have loved Mother Maeve, in one or two or even three senses of the word?
Amor, voluptas, caritas
. But he’s kept that view to himself: to express it would be too irritating to Jorrie, especially if he includes the Latin. Jorrie has scant patience with anything Latin. It’s a part of his life she’s never been able to grasp. Why waste your life on a bunch of fusty, forgotten scribblers in a dead language? He was so smart, he was so talented, he could have been … (A long list of things he could have been would follow, none of them in any way possible.)

So best not to hit that button.

“Oafs and thugs” was a phrase they’d lifted from their eighth-grade principal who’d harangued the whole school about the dangers of turning into oafs and thugs, especially if you threw snowballs with rocks in them or wrote swear words on the blackboard. “Oafs vs. Thugs” became, briefly, a schoolyard game invented by Tin in his popular, pre-pansy period. It was
something like Capture the Flag and was played only on the boys’ side of the playground. Girls could not be oafs and thugs, said Tin: only boys, which made Jorrie resentful.

It was she who came up with the idea of calling Mother Maeve’s on-again, off-again gentleman callers – “or you could say, in-again, out-again,” Tin would quip later – the Oafs and Thugs. That ruined the game for Tin; no doubt it contributed to his pansyhood, he decided later. “Don’t blame
me
,” said Jorrie. “I didn’t invite them home.”

“Darling, I’m not blaming you, I’m thanking you,” Tin said. “I’m deeply grateful.” Which, by that time – after he’d sorted out a few things – he really was.

Their mother wasn’t drunk all the time. Her binges took place only on weekends: she had an underpaid secretarial job that she needed to make ends meet, the military widow’s pension being so minuscule. And she did love the twins in her own way.

“At least she wasn’t too violent,” Jorrie would say. “Though she got carried away.”

“Everyone spanked their kids then. Everyone got carried away.” Indeed it was a point of honour to compare your slice of corporal punishment with those of other children, and to exaggerate. Slippers, belts, rulers, hairbrushes, ping-pong paddles: those were the parental weapons of choice. It made the young twins sad that they didn’t have a father to administer such beatings, only ineffectual Mother Maeve, whom they could reduce to tears by pretending to be mortally injured, whom they could tease with relative impunity, from whom they could run away. There were two of them and only one of her, so they ganged up.

“I suppose we were heartless,” Jorrie would say.

“We were disobedient. We talked back. We were out of control. But adorable, you have to grant that.”

“We were brats. Heartless little brats. We showed no mercy,” Jorrie sometimes adds. Is it regret, or bragging?

On the cusp of adolescence, Jorrie had a painful experience with one of the oafs – a sneak attack from which Tin failed to defend her, being asleep at the time. That has weighed on him. It must have messed up her life in regards to men, though most likely her life would have been messed up anyway. She deals with this incident now by making fun of it – “I was ravished by a troll!” – but she hasn’t always managed that. She was downright sullen on the subject of rape in the early ’70s when so many women were going on the rampage, but she seems to have got over that by now.

Molesting isn’t everything, in Tin’s view. He himself never got molested by the oafs, but his relationships with men were just as scrambled, and if anything more so. Jorrie said he had a problem with love: he conceptualizes it too much. He said Jorrie didn’t conceptualize it enough. That was back when love was still a topic of conversation for them.

“We should put all of our lovers in a blender,” Jorrie said once. “Mix them up, average them out.” Tin said she had a brutalist way of putting things.

The truth is, thinks Tin, that the twins never loved anyone except each other. Or they didn’t love anyone unconditionally. Their other loves had many conditions.

“Look who just croaked,” says Jorrie now. “Big Dick Metaphor!”

“That nickname could apply to a lot of men,” says Tin. “Though I assume you mean someone in particular. I can see your ears twitching, so he must be important to you.”

“Three guesses,” says Jorrie. “Hint: He was at the Riverboat a
lot, that summer when I was doing their bookkeeping, volunteer, part-time.”

“Because you wanted to hang out with the bohemians,” said Tin. “I do have a vague recollection. So who? Blind Sonny Terry?”

“Don’t be silly,” says Jorrie. “He was decrepit even then.”

“I give up. I never went there much, it was too fetid for me. Those folksingers made a fetish of not bathing.”

“That’s untrue,” says Jorrie. “Not all of them. I know it for a fact. No fair giving up!”

“Who ever said I was fair? Not you.”

“You should be able to read my mind.”

“Oh, a challenge. All right: Gavin Putnam. That self-styled poet you were so nuts about.”

“You knew all along!”

Tin sighs. “He was so derivative, him and his poetry both. Sentimental trash. Quite gruesomely putrid.”

“The early ones were very good,” says Jorrie defensively. “The sonnets, except they weren’t sonnets. The Dark Lady ones.”

Tin has slipped up, he’s been maladroit. How could he have forgotten that some of Gavin Putnam’s early poems had been about Jorrie? Or so she’d claimed. She’d been thrilled by that. “I’m a Muse,” she’d announced when the Dark Lady suite first appeared in print, or in what passed for print among the poets: a stapled-together mimeo magazine they put out themselves and sold to one another for a dollar.
The Dirt
, they’d called it, in a bid for grittiness.

Tin found it touching that Jorrie was so excited by these poems. He hadn’t seen much of her that season. She had, to put it mildly,
a hyperactive social life, due no doubt to the alacrity with which she flung herself into bed, whereas he’d been living in a two-roomer over a barbershop on Dundas and having a quiet sexual identity crisis while toiling away at his doctoral thesis.

This was a solid enough but not honestly very inspired re-examination of the cleaner and more presentable epigrams of Martial, though what really drew him to Martial was his no-nonsense attitude towards sex, so much less complicated than that of Tin’s own era. For Martial, there was no romantic pussy-footing, no idealization of Woman as having a higher spiritual calling: Martial would have laughed his head off at that! And no taboos: everyone did everything with everyone: slaves, boys, girls, whores, gay, straight, pornography, scatology, wives, young, middle-aged, old, front, back, mouth, hand, cock, beautiful, ugly, and downright repulsive. Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance. Chastity was not the primary virtue, for men or for women either, but certain forms of friendship and generosity and tenderness did get top marks. His contemporaries labelled Martial as unusually sunny and good-natured, nor did his scathing, acerbic wit do anything to diminish that perception. His criticisms were not directed at individuals, he claimed, but at types; though Tin had his doubts about that.

But a thesis was not about why you appreciated your subject: in academia, he’d come to understand, that kind of thing should be reserved for social chit-chat. You had to cook up something more focused. Tin’s central hypothesis revolved around the difficulties of satire in an age lacking in shared moral standards, which Martial’s age did, in spades: he’d moved to Rome when Nero was in power. Indeed, was Martial a true satirist or just a
smutty gossip, as some commentators had claimed? Tin intended to defend his hero against this charge: there was so much more to Martial, he would say, than cocks and boy-fucking and sluts and fart jokes! Though he would not of course use those crude vernacular terms in his thesis. And he’d do his own translations, updating the diction to fit Martial’s well-crafted slang, though the filthiest of the epigrams were prudently to be avoided: their time had not yet come.

“You imitate youth, Laetinus, by dyeing your hair. Presto! Yesterday a swan, you’re now a raven. But you can’t fool everyone: Proserpina spots your grey hair. And she’ll yank your stupid disguise right off your head!” This was the tone he sought in his translations – contemporary, punchy, not stilted. He used to spend a week over one or two lines. But he doesn’t do that any more, because who cares?

He’d received a grant for his doctoral studies, though it wasn’t large. Jorrie told him Classics was surely going to disappear very soon, and then how would he earn his living? He should have gone into Design, because he would have made a killing. But, said Tin, a killing was exactly what he didn’t want to make because to make a killing you had to kill, and he lacked the killer instinct.

“Money talks,” said Jorrie, who despite her bohemian leanings wanted to have lots of it. She had no intention of toiling away in some tedious, soul-grinding factotum job, overworked and underpaid and a prey to oafs and thugs, the way their mother had. Her nascent vision involved flashy cars and vacations in the Caribbean and a closetful of figure-hugging fabrics. She hadn’t articulated that vision yet, not out loud, but Tin could see it coming.

“Yes,” said Tin. “Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.” Martial could have said that. Possibly Martial did
say it. He would have to check.
Aureo hamo piscari
. To fish with a golden hook.

The barbers on the ground floor of Tin’s building were three elderly misanthropic Italian brothers who did not know what the world was coming to except that it was bad. The shop had a rack of girlie magazines featuring police stories and pictures of hookers with enormous bosoms, which was what men were supposed to like. These magazines made Tin feel queasy – the spectre of Mother Maeve hovered rakishly above anything to do with black brassieres – but he got his hair cut there anyway as a goodwill gesture and leafed through the magazines while he waited. It didn’t do to be too openly gay then, and anyway he was still deciding; and the Italian barbers were his landlords and needed to be buttered up.

He’d had to make it clear to them, however, that Jorrie was his twin sister, not a girlfriend of loose character. Despite their stash of lurid magazines, which they probably viewed as professional equipment, they were puritanical about any unsanctioned goings-on in their rental accommodations. They thought Tin was a fine, upstanding scholarly youth, called him The Professor, and kept asking him when he was going to get married. “I’m too poor,” Tin would say. Or “I’m waiting for the right girl.” Sage nods from the barbershop trio: both excuses were acceptable to them.

So when Jorrie would arrive on her infrequent visits, the Italian barbers would wave to her through the window and smile in their triste way. How nice that The Professor had such an exemplary sister. It was what a family should be like.

When the Dark Lady issue of
The Dirt
came out, Jorrie could hardly wait to share her Musehood with Tin. She’d galloped up the stairs, waving her hot-off-the-mimeo
Dirt
, and plumped herself down in his wicker basket chair.

“Look at this!” she’d said, thrusting the stapled pages at him while sweeping back her long dark hair with one hand. She had a swatch of red-and-ochre block-printed cloth wound around her trim waist, and a necklace of – What were those? Cow’s teeth? – dangling over her scoop-necked peasant blouse. Her eyes were shining, her bangles were jangling. “Seven poems! About
me
!”

She was so guileless. She was so avid. If Tin hadn’t been her brother, if he’d been straight, he would have run a mile; but away from her or towards her? She was faintly terrifying. She wanted it all. She wanted them all. She wanted experiences. In Tin’s already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.