One Hit Wonders Page 3

  It’s Al’s turn to laugh. “What I’m driving at—if you’ll forgive the pun—is that the group is always a weapon for the person who can use it most effectively.”

  Lila blinks. She raises her left hand and arranges a strand of hair over her ear. Her seahorse earring flashes a rhinestone eye.

  “Like your daddy, for example,” he says, gesturing towards the other side of the room.

  Lila looks over at her father. Llewellyn, his face flushed, is talking with a group of tanned men; each one of them wearing a blue pinstripe suit. Two have green ties, two have pink. Llewellyn looks happy, she thinks. It is still early in the pre-Christmas drinking season. By the New Year, his pallor will be the colour of an old wasps’ nest.

  “Your daddy had some opposition to the idea of hiring the club’s first pro golfer, but was able to leverage the news about his fixed link proposal at—what do you call the legislative building here, the yellow brick one shaped like an upside-down capital T?”

  “Confederation Building.”

  “That’s it. Government support equals social capital equals leverage. I call it the cascade effect. Excel in one area and people start listening to everything you have to say. Suddenly there’s media buzz about the possibility of a fixed link and the next thing Llew’s idea of hiring a golf-pro gets supported by the same people who shot it down the first time around. When is his proposal being floated anyway?”

  “Sometime in the spring.”

  I make my way toward her through the crowd, balancing a plate of devilled eggs in one hand and a glass of eggnog in the other. She smiles at me. I try to smile back but the strain of this annual Christmas party, a strain that seems to increase each year, has gotten the better of me. I manage a grimace.

  “Have you met my husband yet, Mr. Calhoun?”

  Lila doesn’t know it but I’ve met Al on two previous occasions, both times while I was part of a group, both times when I was drunk enough to assume he was drunk too. Each time the person who introduced him threw in the same two pieces of information: that Al had once placed third in the Canadian Open and that in his early years he caddied for Arnold Palmer when “The King” was on the senior’s tour. Al’s response, on each occasion, was to downplay both achievements. “About the Canadian Open,” he said, “you have to understand that it was the year of the big flu; almost every pro from here to Tallahassee was blowing chunks. You only had to look at the leader board on the last day to know that something was wrong. I mean coming in third only sounds good until you find out that a giraffe in Birkenstocks came in second.” At which point he took a long pause, swirled the ice in his glass before taking a swallow and continuing: “I know it’s not nice to talk about old Flory Van Donck that way.”

  I could tell from his delivery that this was a line he had used more than a few times, its timing designed to elicit big laughs from a well-lubricated crowd. He didn’t expect anyone other than a few hoary golf historians to have heard of Van Donck.

  “Belgium’s finest. The pride of Tervuren,” I said.

  “None other. Ol’ Flim Flanders, himself.” Al’s interest was piqued.

  “I didn’t know he played in Canada.”

  “Sure did. Won the Canada Cup back in 1960.”

  “You would have been a kid in 1960.”

  “I was still shittin’ yeller.”

  A conman—a charming one—but a conman nonetheless, was my first and second opinion of Al Calhoun.

  Al half-turns his body away from Lila, nods to me. “Hell, yes. We’re old friends, ain’t we Freddy?”

  “Did you know that Al here once placed third in the Canadian Open and that in his early years he was a frequent caddy for Arnold Palmer?”

  “I didn’t know that,” Lila says, doing her best to sound impressed.

  I wait for Al to perform as expected, but he just grins. “So how does it feel, Lila, to be married to the feller who wrote that famous book?”

  “Oh that book is so last year, Al.”

  “Wait now. Don’t be hasty. I’d say it’s more relevant than ever. Didn’t I just say that the social group is a kind of weapon—or maybe a tool is a better word—for whoever can best manipulate it? I think I borrowed that idea from Freddy here.”

  “There are no new ideas. Only new minds,” I slur, gulping down the last of my eggnog.

  Al makes as if to flip pages in an imaginary spiral notebook; he licks the tip of an invisible pencil. “I’m just kidding…And not. I was attempting to make a learned reference to your idea about technology extending the reach of the individual.”

  “And also limiting it to the point that it will eventually dictate the range of an individual’s behaviour,” I remind him.

  “Well, I’ve never been too big on book learning but I reckon titanium extended my tee shot by a good ten yards. Course these days I won’t swing a club unless it’s made of titanium or a high-grade titanium alloy. So I guess that kind of makes your point.”

  I turn my blank expression on him.

  “How many of those have you had, Freddy?” Lila wants to know.

  “Seven or eight. If I don’t watch it, I’ll be shittin’ yeller.”

  “It’s alcohol free,” she says.

  “Al, can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot, Freddy.”

  “It says on your job application that you grew up in Ottawa, but you sound like a southerner.”

  “Freddy, don’t be rude.”

  “No offense taken, Ma’am. It’s a good question, even though it was phrased as a statement. Now usually I’m not in the habit of explaining myself to strangers, but you all aren’t strangers. Hell, I owe my being here in the first place to her daddy. So let me put it this way. Mom was a St. Pete’s girl, born and bred. My daddy was both an avid golfer and a snowbird, so even though I grew up in the nation’s capital I spent a good chunk of every winter and almost all of every summer in FLA. Mix in thirty years on the pro circuit and a few thousand gallons of bourbon, and this is what you end up with.”

  “I didn’t mean any offense,” I tell him. I feel dampness on my top lip and around my hairline.

  “Of course you didn’t. And none taken, I can assure you. Ah hell, when it comes down to it, I’m as fake as a three dollar bill. It just took a smart fella like you to call it.”

  We all laugh at the same time. Al digs his thumbs into his waistband and pulls up his slacks. I spy Lila spy a flash of hair on his surprisingly toned stomach.

  “So what are you writing these days, Freddy?”

  “Freddy doesn’t like to talk about his writing,” Lila says.

  “Well, listen to you little lady, jumping in right off to protect your man, like you’ve been trained to.”

  Lila falls silent. Al turns to face me. “So you’re a writer but you don’t like talking about your writing when you’re writing it. Cause its personal. Am I right?”

  “Right,” I tell him.

  “Hold on a second there. If it’s OK for you to ask me a personal question, then it should be OK for me to ask you one.”

  I look to Lila for arbitration. She shrugs.

  “You’re right. I can’t have it both ways. The chapter I’m working on now is about the professional life and the concept of impeded upward mobility. The main character has just been laid off and is spending a lot of time in his house. That got me thinking about roof slates and shingles and other roofing materials and why, with the exception of the skylight, we have never made an attempt—architecturally speaking—to exploit the sky view. I mean, when you think about it, the sky is the most changeable and dramatic piece in our environment but we rarely look at it. Even when we are outside, we mostly walk around with our heads down. If we’re driving, we look straight ahead. If we’re a passenger, we scan left to right. At night, the streetlights block out the stars. I’d hazard a guess that the number of times we look up at the sky in any given week could be used as an index to our mental health.”

  Later, Lila tells me she wondered where
I was going with this. Was I winding Al up? Was this the beginning of an extended allegory about Al’s fall from grace as a regular member of the pro circuit? Was it an obtuse reference to his being a washed-up pro at a Canadian golf course that was covered in snow for six months of the year?

  She glances at Al. His eyes are twinkling. If there is a joke, he gives every impression that he is very much in on it. Or it could be that he is simply laughing at me, at the way I trip over my words in my excitement to get them out, gesturing wildly with my empty glass.

  “Imagine that the ceiling on the top floor of your house is made of glass,” I continue. “And imagine above that again another layer of glass—or some transparent material—against the rafters, so the whole attic space is enclosed. Now imagine that the roof of your house is covered in some kind of lightweight shingle or slate—titanium, say—and that they’re attached to a frame that is in turn attached to some kind of control mechanism, so that at the touch of a button, all the shingles or slates would turn on their edges, like venetian blinds. They could even be computerized to track the path of the sun. Or not—depending on preference. Just think about how that would transform your living space, especially in northern climates where there is so little light for so much of the year. I’d bet that visits to doctors would plummet, as would sales of mood-enhancing drugs. The healthcare savings alone would be enormous. Productivity in the workplace would go through the roof.”

  Lila groans.

  “And there are probably all kinds of other practical applications. Your attic space would effectively become a greenhouse, which could be used to grow vegetables, fruit, and flowers all year round. Imagine the aerial view of a city where almost every attic was some kind of green space?”

  “Wow. Now that’s what I call thinking outside the box,” says Al, raising his glass to me. “I guess if there was a philosophical message to be taken from what you just described it would be this, ‘look up!’”

  At which point all three of us look towards the ceiling of the Tee-Hee-Hee, taking in rows of unusually long, drippy-looking stucco spikes.

  “Like a coke head’s hork,” Al says, and bursts out laughing. “I’m not sure where that one came from. All that thinking outside the box has got me thinking wacky. I know from experience—not personal, of course—that there’s nothing will put you in a pine box sooner than that old cocaine; the devil’s dandruff. Bad shit.”

  At which point I walk away, in a hurry, eight glasses of eggnog suddenly revealing to me their hidden properties as a laxative.

  As Lila watches me weave a path through the crowd, she can feel the weight of Al’s gaze on her cleavage, warming her like a shot of something she just knows she has to have.

  4

  LILA HAD A thing with another man early in our marriage. It was an act of sexual housekeeping, a way to exorcize a demon. How do I know this? I know because I didn’t know about it, didn’t twig, didn’t suspect a thing until long afterwards. I had no idea it happened until I read through her journals in the months following her death. Far from destroying us, her first affair returned her to herself. When it was all over, she returned home, to me, fully committed. All evidence points to this.

  Most couples have nothing in particular to hide except their intimacy, which is the thing that others—those outside the circle of two—both crave and resent. Intimacy thrives on privacy. To become intimate with the private world of another couple is to destroy it. Privacy is exclusive. Just ask any couple who has tried an open relationship or taken part in group sex.

  The sense of privacy that Lila and I deliberately cultivated, that let us contain one another and be contained, that guided our growth, was sacrosanct. Or so I thought. We used to talk about it, describing our relationship in mock-heroic terms: “fortress us,” “the elephant in the castle,” “the tabernacle.” Deep down, we knew the only people who could have occupied it with us—though never in the same way we shared it as a couple—would have been children. The children we debated having, at length, over many years, deciding over and again that we would not have them. The beings who circled around the shining egg of our relationship like so many black sperm until the day the decision finally stuck.

  So no one got in, though many were allowed to visit, given a glimpse, and the happiest of them brought their own intimacy and left with it intact. Others—and there were many more of these—peered through our lit windows at night, listened at vents, perched like jackdaws on the chimney pot, looked for weaknesses in our security. The wiliest of these interlopers was Al Calhoun.

  Al found a way in. After him, all bets were off.

  I realize this doesn’t quite support the breach of privacy I am about to make: my decision to include here a page from Lila’s journal, written, in her preferred bullet-form, sometime after I had discovered what happened between her and Al; sometime after we had contained the damage and decided to carry on. The date scrawled at the top of the page tells me the entry was written four months and three days before my darling’s death.

  Let me say in my defence that it would never have occurred to me to do such a thing while Lila was still alive. Death changes the equation. Death makes our privacy, our intimacy, our confidentiality agreements, null and void.

  We were sitting on white wicker furniture inside a willow circle, making small talk with Aunt Nora’s Wicca friends, when this more or less nondescript woman in a leisure suit walked up and began to stare at me. Suddenly the whole enclosure was pistol-whipped by a thug breeze. Skirts flew up (there were some big panties on display). The wine box blew off the table. Twigs cracked. A handful of leaves spun down, their stems still luscious and green. That’s when she said it. “Your aura is bubble-gum pink.”

  Freddy stuck his finger in his mouth, puffed out his cheek and popped it. “Spiritual hymen,” he whispered in my ear. So naughty.

  On that particular day I was filled with love, and not just love for Freddy, but love of all sorts: wrinkly-cup-o-tea-and-stale-biscuit-grandma love, giggling-bubbling-blowing-farts-on-a-baby’s-belly love, little-boy-booger love, and fey-little-girl love. And best of all, big-frightened-man love.

  That was me at twenty-five.

  Why am I remembering this? Oh, right, my therapist wants me to “journal” on love.

  This is Lila-on-love. LOL.

  I was good at all kinds of love back then—it all seemed to come natural to me—all except for one kind: razor-spiky sister love. Love like a nail-studded piece of wood wrapped in six socks to train a retriever, give her a soft mouth, that kind of sisterly love. See us meet in the street: all kisses and hugs, all coos and aahs and superlatives. So bitchy and supportive. Talk to the hand. Why am I writing like a Black woman, a woman of colour?

  A woman is a Janus-faced thing. Men are right to be afraid.

  I am more than a little in love with this new Cawarra Shiraz-Cabernet blend. Blood of Christ. I especially like that it comes in this super big bottle. It’s the kind of grape that stains lips and teeth purple. Something sexy about that.

  The trouble with the Church is not the message but the messengers: too many old hetero men hard-wired to their vows, their nut sacks lumpy with coagulated spunk. Fertile women an affront to them. Aye, there’s the rub.

  I mean what’s experience but a mirror. No, wait. Mirrors are mirrors. Experience is—are?—is?—more like eyeglasses. It makes us better able to see, which is why we get better at lying, more skilled with disguises.

  At twenty-five, I had juicy love for the whole world. Slut.

  At twenty-six, I knew things weren’t perfect—things were not all they could be in the bedroom—but I still believed in the power of love to transform. Jesus, break out the violins.

  At twenty-seven, I had my first affair, with a landscape painter. Oh he was weathered and muscled. Driftwood. I used to lie around his apartment naked in the hopes he would paint me. No such luck. Nailed to the cross, I was. He wanted a mule. Oh those afternoons tramping marshes and fens and bogs, listening to
the rubber-band twang of frogs. I perched on logs while he painted. I let the black flies eat me. I kind of enjoyed it. Call it natural S&M foreplay. I knew that if he had a good session he would want to fuck me afterwards. And I loved fucking outdoors. Nothing sexier, if you ask me.

  I need to take a little break here. I am going on holiday in my mind. I’m going to take a walk along the beach in Punta Cana. I’m leaving behind the last tourist shack and the signs that say don’t go “passed” this point. To my right, sandpipers waltz with the surf; to my left, spiked creepers crawl out from the jungle across the sand. The sand is no longer pure and white but heaped with tangled piles of seaweed that smell of bleach. The surf booms. I must cross a coral outcrop to get to the next stretch of beach. A seventh wave comes crashing over the reef, sluices in, soaking me through and through. My sarong and t-shirt are a second skin, showing everything. But it doesn’t matter because there’s no one to see me when I take off my clothes and lie back against a slab of rock. The bare rock is so hot against my skin. I drape a forearm over my eyes and let the sun open me like an hibiscus, find a way inside to burn away the shadow.

  And as for me and X, well, we failed to paint it black. The last I heard he was working for Bull’s-Eye Marketing. Seems to me now that I was just flexing my girl muscle one last time. The years following the painter were my happiest with Freddy. I’m pretty sure he didn’t suspect a thing.

  At thirty-five, I didn’t know what love was anymore. Boo-hoo! But still true. What I thought was this: persona is a crude Halloween mask. I started to believe in mine and look what happened? I fell in love with Al Calhoun, a man who didn’t believe in anything.

  Where some people have a core, I have a void. Even now I see the demons fall. I see heaven as a pepper grinder and God is standing at the top turning the handle and all these little black shapes come sprinkling down. Meat hungry, they are. They bring out my flavour.