Lost Between Houses (8 page)

“What does your mother tell you?”

“My mother tells me I have a sensuous mouth.”

“Oh yeah?”

“That I will be an excellent kisser.”

“Really,” she said. And then she turned her head to the side and said something that I didn’t quite catch.

“What?” I said, but she didn’t answer and I knew not to push it. I was just about bursting with pleasure though. Funny thing about that expression, “seeing red”: it’s supposed to be when you’re pissed off. It’s just the opposite with me. When I’m happy things go kind of strawberry.

“Do you?”

“Do I what?” I said.

“Think my nose is too blunt?”

“No.”

“Look at it.”

“I think you look like a movie star. I don’t know what I’d do if I was as good-looking as you. I don’t think I could stand it. I’d be going over to the mirror every fifteen minutes. I mean I do that anyway, I keep hoping something will change between trips.”

“If I saw you on the street, I’d think, that’s a nice-looking person.”

“Yeah?”

“A friend of mine said you were going to be a real doll when you grew up,” she said.

“Who was that?”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“But really, she said that?”

“Yep. But don’t let it go to your head.”

“I won’t.

I waited a moment.

“You’re sure she meant me?”

“Sure I’m sure. She named you by name.”

It’s true what they say; you never notice fuck-all until you’re doing it yourself; you get a puppy, suddenly you see all the dogs in the world; it’s the same for couples, suddenly, they’re everywhere. Like all over the place, even the Chinese, everybody just
doing
it. Like it’s the only game in town. Which come to think of it, it is. But I’m telling you, it was like waking up in a totally new country.

“Let’s steal something,” Scarlet said.

“Forget it.”

“Why not?” she said, sort of peeved.

“Because I don’t want to get caught. Because I don’t want to get wheeled down the driveway of my summer cottage in the back of a squad car in handcuffs.”

“You remember in that movie, when they go in and steal something?” she said.

“I didn’t see that movie.”

“Well you should have. It was a really good movie.”

“What do they steal?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s just something they do together because they’re in love.”

“Maybe you got more guts than me,” I said, sucking up a bit. “I’m scared of getting caught. Aren’t you scared of getting caught?”

“I’ve been caught before,” she said. “My father thought it was a big fat joke.”

“My father’d slug me.”

“If my father ever laid a hand on me, I’d stick a knife through him like a bug.”

I sort of looked at her twice when she said that. I wanted to tell her to simmer down, there was nobody in our immediate vicinity who deserved to die for fucking around with her, not so far today anyway, but I figured that’d piss her off even more. Whatever it was, it changed the climate just like that, on a dime, and for some reason my heart started beating fast like I was in trouble or something.

We passed by a pet store. There was a little bowl of goldfish swimming in the window.

“What’s your father in the loony bin for?” she asked.

“For being an asshole. They’ve got a special wing for those people. My family are charter members.”

Funny thing is, as I said it, I felt a sort of spear go through me, shame or something, as if, like in those cartoons, right up at the corner, I could see my old man listening to me talking about him like that. It actually made me wince. I mean, sure, he was an asshole (a bully mostly), but he was more than
just
an asshole. But you wouldn’t have known that from listening to me. Sometimes I think I’ll say anything about anybody just to get a laugh. It’s pretty disgusting.

“You should come up to our summer cottage,” she said.

“I didn’t know you guys had a cottage.”

“My father rents it. It’s up in Georgian Bay. He goes there with his show-business buddies and they all get pissed for a week.”

“So what do you do?”

“Nothing. Wander around the rocks. Look at the water. Go down to the dock. Scratch mosquito bites. We don’t even have a TV.”

“Maybe you should take up drinking.”

“I already do that. Drinking and masturbating.”

“Jesus, Scarlet.”

“Well really,” she said, laughing, “there’s nothing else to do up there.”

“Don’t you know anybody up there?”

“Look who’s changing the subject. And look whose face is turning red,
Mr Beetman.
What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? That’s got to be a first. How do you spend
your
time up at your cottage? Fishing and water-skiing and all that cottage crap?”

“Well I don’t spend it doing
that.”

“Not at all?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

We walked on for a little while.

“Sometimes I do it in front of the mirror,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, Scarlet,” I said, “will you
cool
it?”

But you could see she was real pleased to have got that in.

Just to get her off the subject, I went into one of those discount clothing stores. It was nice and cool in there, old ladies shopping for lingerie or pants for their retarded sons, I don’t know, but we just drifted along from aisle to aisle, picking stuff up and putting it back until we got a house detective standing so close to us that we scooted out the other side and back into the sunshine. By now I was pretty hungry so we went into Fran’s on St Clair. I must have been getting pretty easy with Scarlet because this time I didn’t mind eating in front of her. Even a big messy cheeseburger with the cheese dripping down the side,
her sitting on the other side of the booth, her feet up, leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette.

“I got to go back to school in five weeks,” she said. “Fuck.”

The waitress came over and asked her to put her feet down.

“Sorry,” she said. When the waitress went away, she put them right back up.

“Do you think I have nice legs?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“I’m not so sure. I think they’re too thick at the bottoms.” She took a puff on her cigarette.

“How come you’re not with Daphne Gunn any more?”

“We broke up.”

“Do you still like her?”

“No.”

“It’s all right if you do you know. Like I don’t own you. Everybody’s got something to hide.”

“Well it’s certainly not Daphne Gunn. She looks like a fucking potato. Like I’m not going to stagger through life all scarred up just because Daphne Gunn dumped me.”

“So she dumped you?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I bet you’d like to get her back.”

“I never think about it.”

“Yes you do. Too bad we couldn’t run into her right now, make her real jealous. That’d be fun wouldn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Admit it,” she said. “It’d be fun.”

“All right, it’d be fun.”

“Next time she’s at a party, tell me. I’ll make a big fuss over you right in front of her.”

She took a puff on her cigarette. “I love getting even with
people. That’s the thing about me. I’m very patient you know. Like I’ll wait years if I have to. But then, just when they think they’re safe, I pounce. Like that.”

“Sounds a little mental to me.”

“I’m just more honest than most people.”

She watched the waitress walk by the table.

“I got a bad temper,” she said. “You don’t want to cross me.”

Sometimes there’s stuff people like about themselves that’s supposed to be bad; but you can tell by the way they talk about it that they think it’s neat. I could tell somebody must have told her once she had a bad temper and she liked how it made her sound.

I finished my burger. Suddenly, all the food hitting my stomach made me go kind of glassy-eyed.

“Boy, I’m bushed,” I said.

“Did I just bore the shit out of you?”

“No.”

“You look bored.”

“How do I look bored?”

“You’re staring at things. That’s what I do when I’m bored. Sometimes it’s a person on the subway. Like a man or something and he thinks I’m giving him the eye. That’s how dumb some guys are.”

“I got to get out of here,” I said. “Otherwise I’m going to land in my ketchup.”

But just then a couple of guys from school walked by, outside the window. Normally I wouldn’t say fuck-all to them, they belonged to a totally different group, guys who took the bus, they lived in parts of Toronto that sounded like different cities, and I always felt a bit sorry for them, being so far from the action and all. But today I waved. One of them, a nice guy with curly hair,
Chummer Farina (now where’d he get a name like that, no wonder he lived on Mars), turned around and saw Scarlet. He said something to his pal, who had an equally weird name, and then they both turned around and looked at her, which pleased me a great deal. I imagined they were talking about it as they went away. But you know, that’s the thing with me. I figure people are walking around all day thinking about me. I mean the fact that I hardly ever think about them or when I do it’s for like a split second, well, you’d think that might discourage me. But no, it doesn’t.

We got back to her place near six. I was pooped. I hadn’t got a lot of sleep and after I ate a sandwich (I couldn’t stop eating now), I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up feeling like you do when you go to sleep in daylight and wake up in the dark, sort of bonkers. I had a terrible taste in my mouth, too. So I went into the bathroom and used her toothbrush again and threw some cold water on my face. When I came out she was sitting by the window, looking out over the city. It was a mighty pretty night, everything just twinkling and you couldn’t hear anything, it was like being in a huge aquarium. We just sat there for awhile, staring out.

“Do you think you’re going to be famous?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” she said.

“A famous model?”

“No, my legs are too short.”

“I think I’m going to be famous,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I think I look at things like a famous person would look at them.”

“That’s a bit conceited.”

“I don’t go around telling people. That would be conceited.”

“You just go around
thinking
it. That’s worse,” she said.

“But I think feeling famous is part of what makes you famous.”

We stared out for awhile longer, not looking at each other, the room getting darker and darker.

“But you got to be able to do something special,” she said after awhile. “Like be able to sing or something.”

“I know.”

“So what can you do?”

“I don’t know yet. But there must be something. Otherwise it’d be a super cruel joke to feel like this.”

“My father likes famous people,” she said. “I think he wishes he was famous himself.”

“Everybody wants to be famous.”

“No. Not everybody thinks it’s a big deal.”

“I think you got to be famous to know it’s no big deal. Otherwise you’re cheating. It’s like you’re giving yourself an excuse not to try.”

“Maybe.”

I looked over at her. She was very pretty in that dark room, her head resting on her hand.

“I’m not going to be famous,” she said. “You don’t know that.”

“No, I do. I’m not good at anything. I’m probably going to end up with somebody famous. That must be why I met you.”

It was some kind of day, I’ll tell you.

I
GOT TO THE STATION
around nine-thirty that night and sat around down there, waiting for my train. I had plenty of things to think about, but I don’t have a lot of patience so I kept getting up and wandering around, looking at the newspapers and the magazines and then going into the coffee shop and then going to have a look at myself in the bathroom mirror and take another pee.

I saw this pretty girl sitting on a bench near me. She looked like a little deer, her hair all short and soft and blond and when her mother went to get something I found myself sort of hoping she’d talk to me. And then I thought, man, I really am a greedy little asshole. Like I just left my girlfriend and here I am, already on the prowl. Anyway she didn’t look twice at me (girls don’t usually, I’ve got to talk to them a bit first, otherwise I’m the Invisible Man), and after awhile she went away and I was left alone there, staring up at that high, high ceiling, listening to the names of tiny little towns come floating over the speaker system. Grimsby … Fergus… Port Dalhousie …

I went over and asked the guy for about the ninth time when the train was coming and he finally sent me down to Track Number Two and I climbed aboard. I wanted to be there first, get a good seat. I’m very fussy about where I sit; doesn’t matter if
it’s a movie or a plane ride, I’ve got to be in just the right place. So I got a seat right next to the aisle so I could get up and take a pee without pissing everybody off. You know, like whenever I wanted to. Of course, once you can, you never have to.

But there was hardly anybody on board, except for an old woman down the aisle eating a sandwich very carefully, eating with these little careful bites like she thought her teeth might break if she chomped down too hard.

A minute later a drunk came wandering through. He had red eyes and a fur hat on and he caught my eye coming into the compartment. I don’t know why but I’m an awful magnet for crazy people, they just seem drawn to me. So I’ve formed a scientific theory to instantly weed them out. I look at their shoes. Crazy people have always got fucked-up shoes. The tongues are hanging out or they’re way too big or they’re absolutely the wrong colour for the guy who’s wearing them, like bright yellow on a bum in a long coat; or they’ve got elevated heels on them, there’s a ton of things to look for. So when I walk down the street, for example, and I see some guy looking through the crowd at me, when I see him make that decision that I’m the guy and start to make a beeline for me, first thing I do is look down and check his shoes.

Which is what I did with the guy on the train. Sure enough, they were fucked-up. No laces.