Greetings from the Vodka Sea Page 12

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I know.” She was already halfway out the door.

  Shulman did not go to the front window to watch her leave. Instead, he went to the living room and sat in his chair. The fire was out now, and the flue exhaled a cool draft. That’s when he spotted them in the corner, by the bay window, overlooking the willow and the sleeping hibiscus: her paints, her easel, half a dozen empty canvases. She forgot them all. Of course, it was her way of telling him that she would be back. It was her way of reassuring him. She left her painting supplies, her sketchbooks, the old shirt she wore (his old shirt), dappled with a hundred colours. This was Zwischenzug. She would be back. He was sure of it.

  The Death of Carver

  The front hedge was nearly buried in snow, and they were still arguing over who would play them in the movie.

  “Brad Pitt?” April stubbed out her cigarette. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Think about it.” Boyd leaned back in the chair and raised his arms behind his head, playing with her now. “I’m a deceptively complicated man; he’s a deceptively complicated actor.”

  “I don’t know, Boyd. I can’t get past the abs.”

  “In high school I —”

  “Don’t say it, Boyd, I’m warning you. Don’t say it.” April gulped the last of her Bacardi and soda. She’d started to do that lately, gulp the last of her drinks, whether to get it over with or to begin again, she was not sure. In any case, it was a bad omen. She’d read in Ms. that gulping was one of the Working Women’s Warning Signs of Alcohol Addiction.

  Boyd smiled. He had the cheekbones, that’s true. Big high Brad Pitt cheekbones, and big thick lips like a male model or a cod. Imagine an older, shorter, chunkier Brad Pitt with bad skin weathered down by time and comfort, superimpose that on the face of a fish — one of your less fishy but more human fish, but a fish all the same — and you got a rough idea of Boyd.

  “But what about you? Julia Roberts? Come on. It doesn’t work, on any level. She’s too,” Boyd tried to think of the right word, “big. This is more of a . . . pastiche. It’s an ensemble piece at best.”

  That was unfair, of course. He’d said himself she looked like Julia Roberts. An older, shorter, chunkier Julia Roberts, but slightly less cross-eyed and warmer in tone.

  “I’ve changed my mind anyway. I’m thinking Angelica Huston. She has the range, the compression to pack a lot into a character who admittedly only dances on the periphery of the story.”

  Carver raged again from the back room. “God damn you, Ford! God damn you!”

  Boyd and April hushed. She tried not to look at him; he tried not to look at her. But their eyes met momentarily, and that giddiness overtook them. April had to cover her little mouth with both hands to suppress the laughter.

  “If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times: I shot the bird, Ford. I shot the God damn bird!”

  Boyd and April strained to hear Ford’s reply. He spoke in a gentlemanly Kentucky fried accent. Very restrained. Well modulated. Polite. They could make out little of what he said, the odd word. “Bird” came up a few times; “sophistry”; “trousers” or a word that sounded very much like trousers; frequent expletives (“shee-it” seemed to be a particular favourite of Ford’s). Then silence.

  April tried the dip. It was a new one, pimento-chive, she’d picked up the recipe over the Internet. She’d gone a little heavy on the garlic and turned her head as her taste buds adjusted.

  “And Carver?” Boyd smiled. He had his ideas.

  April lit another cigarette and rattled her glass in Boyd’s direction. He took it obligingly.

  “Carver,” she said. “That’s a tough one. Ford’s easy. I’m thinking that guy . . . you know, that guy from that movie?”

  “What guy?

  “You know, that guy. From that movie. We just rented it.”

  “What was it about?”

  “You know. A robbery.”

  “Well, that just about describes half the movies we ever rent.”

  “He’s a character actor. Very good. Nondescript. Slips into his roles. Good ol’ what’s-his-name.”

  Boyd was nodding. He knew the man now. “That guy in that movie about the thing. Where he tries to kidnap his wife for the ransom money, but everything fucks up.”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s right. He’d be perfect. Maybe not quite,” he held out April’s glass as he tried to recover the waylaid word, “debonair. Ford is kind of, you know, debonair.”

  April nodded. He had her there.

  “Perhaps he could play it, though. Perhaps he could play it debonair. Proper lighting, the right costume —”

  “A seersucker suit —”

  “A seersucker suit. He’s the kind of actor who could pull it off.”

  They sat in silence for a moment and sipped their drinks. Seersucker. Was that the right word? She wouldn’t have minded arguing that point. But it sounded right, and if it wasn’t right, it still fit Ford to a T. April was about to suggest Kevin Spacey when Carver started coughing in the back room. He coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed, then coughed some more. A thick, phlegmy, devilled-egg cough: sour, wet on the outside, dry on the inside, slightly oily.

  April tried to say something when the coughing stopped. But Carver started up again, and this time he coughed so much that April was sure he would expire right then and there, just cough his lungs out on the guest bedspread and expire like every warranty she’d ever had. But then he stopped. Ford murmured some words of comfort. Boyd could make out only one of them: “puddle.” It was a strange choice, under the circumstances, but he had to admit, it did sound comforting.

  April looked out the window. The snow was still falling, falling. The car was buried, making a most uncarlike mound on the street. She imagined the view of the house from the road, snow stacked up against the screen door, snow drifting off the front of the cantilevered roof, glazing the row of colonial pillars, completely obscuring the frieze work on the three load-bearing arches that supported the classical Grecian façade.

  “Michael Douglas,” April said suddenly, hoping, it seemed, to get a rise.

  Boyd did not disappoint. “What? For Carver?”

  April nodded.

  “Too old.”

  “Then, Russell Crowe. He has the intensity.”

  “Too young.”

  “It’s a movie, damn it, Boyd. It can take liberties. Besides, Russell Crowe can pull it off. Did you see The Insider? That man has chops, Boyd. That man has chops.”

  Gulp, gulp, gulp. She was finding she could handle her liquor a lot better now, which wasn’t actually a good thing if you took the editors at Ms. to heart. Enhanced capacity for alcohol: another Working Woman’s Warning Sign of Alcohol Addiction.

  “Do you like them, then? His books?”

  Boyd shrugged. In truth, he never read them.

  “It’s not my thing, really. I’m into more traditional stories. You know: beginning, middle, end. You?”

  April shrugged right back. “I don’t read much anymore. Articles, on the bus sometimes, when I’m not sleeping. I saw the movie.”

  Boyd raised his eyebrows — a signature move — conveying that he saw the movie too and that he had a generally favourable opinion of it. “He’s a minimalist, I suppose,” he added, as an afterthought.

  April shook her head. She’d never been one to characterize writers. She shifted in her seat. Her back was acting up again. It hadn’t been the same since the breast reduction surgery (a small price to pay for perfect breasts, however). It was the sciatic nerve. The chiropractor said it was because of the operation and because her chair at work didn’t offer enough support, enough, that is, of the right kind of support. She leaned back, tipping the chair slightly. That was better.

  “So. Do you want to get a video or something?” Boyd was getting bored.

  “Do you think we should? I mean, it doesn’t seem quite right, what with Carver in the next roo
m . . .” Now it was her turn to hesitate. She had never actually said it before, not in this context anyway. Boyd just looked at her, daring her to finish. “Not with him in the guest room . . . passing away.” She took a gulp from her drink, sucking on an ice cube, one of those machine-made ones with the divot in the middle. She bit the ice cube and danced the pieces across the roof her mouth with her tongue. Usually Boyd didn’t like it when she drank, but he was drinking himself tonight and had started things right with a fat spliff. He hadn’t smoked up in years; it seemed to take the edge off him. She wanted to ask him, Boyd, how’d we get this way, how’d we become a middle-aged married couple with nothing good left to argue about, when Carver started belly-aching again. At first it was impossible to understand a single word (Boyd’s eyes froze in a half-roll — another signature move). Carver’s voice was unusually high, and April was sure that he was crying, or at least trying to speak through great anguish. Her father did the same thing when he was dying. A great anguish came over him. The context all but eluded her now — it had something to do with a business deal he’d made years before, when he bought out a partner or had a partner buy his shares — but the subtext still resonated. He wanted absolution. He wanted to die with an easy conscience. He wanted to forgive himself. April couldn’t really help him. She held his a hand and said, There there there, that was a long time ago. You just rest, Daddy. You just let yourself get some rest. And he did. He closed his eyes and slipped gently into that good night. But Carver wasn’t going anywhere just yet. He began shouting again, at first incomprehensibly. But soon they could make out the words.

  “I’m telling you, Ford, you have to tell the truth! The truth, Ford. The truth! You didn’t kill the bird. I killed the bird! I killed the God damned bird.”

  This time they didn’t giggle, they didn’t even feel like it. Boyd was rolling another joint. He was pretty good at it. Dexterous. A craftsman-in-the-works. April was chugging her drink. She felt a little guilty about it (guilt: another Warning Sign for Working Women), but she did it anyway. She wanted to be drunk. She wanted to be drunker than any one person had ever been drunk before.

  “What’s with the bird, Boyd? What does that mean?”

  Boyd shrugged as he licked the edge of the rolling paper.

  “Maybe it’s an allusion.”

  “Well, duh. Obviously he’s alluding to something.”

  “I mean, like, a literary allusion. Maybe there’s a bird in a book or something.”

  “I suppose. Or a symbol.” Her father told her once, years ago, that birds frequently had a symbolic function in literature. “Maybe it represents freedom —”

  “— or some kind of abstract notion of life —”

  “Yes.” April started to get excited now. “Or the human spirit? Maybe it’s a comment on the indomitability of the human spirit?”

  “Or the domitability,” Boyd said.

  “Do you think?”

  “He does kill the bird, right? That seems to be the whole point. That he killed the bird.”

  “But you could read that, again, as a triumph. We assume that he’s speaking in anger, imploring Ford to set the record straight. Maybe it’s defiance. Maybe he’s asking Ford to tell the world that he, Carver, beat the bird. He beat the bird before the bird beat him?”

  Boyd sat back in the couch and lit the joint. He took a deep, deep toke that went straight to his eyes. “It’s possible,” smoke leaked from his mouth as he spoke, “that it’s just a bird. Maybe they have nothing else to talk about except that bird.”

  That was a good point. April shifted in her seat, struggling to think of something meaningful to do (hence — and she understood this very clearly — the alcohol, which neatly filled the empty spaces between meaning).

  “You know, I was a pretty good actress myself, once.”

  “Actor.”

  “Actor?

  “Yeah. They call them actors now. Male, female, it doesn’t matter. It’s a gender equity thing.”

  April sighed. She liked the world when it wasn’t post-feminist.

  “Anyway, the point is, I used to be a pretty good little actress.”

  “I know. I saw you. Your Blanche Dubois, that was good.”

  “I struggled with Gabbler.”

  “Who didn’t?”

  “I’m not saying that I was a great actress —”

  “I understand.”

  “— or that I could play the part.”

  “I know. It’s just talk.” The words faded in the grey light.

  “No one’s better qualified.”

  Boyd coughed. “It could be an . . . emissary.”

  “Huh?”

  “The bird. Maybe it’s an emissary from God or from some other Higher Power. Some kind of go-between between heaven and earth, between the possible and the drearily obvious.”

  Boyd paused.

  “And maybe Carver’s saying that by killing the bird he’s cut off the link between the high and the low, he’s forced us, the high and the low, to come together, to meet on equal terms.”

  “I like that.”

  “It’s a standard motif.”

  “Still . . .”

  See. That was why she hung in with Boyd after all these years, why she still loved him. When you scraped off the layers of varnish and bullshee-it, there was still a decent man inside.

  “So, what about that video? The new Russell Crowe is in. We could check it out, audition him right here on the couch.” Boyd smiled wide and stretched his arms wide apart to suggest that their couch went on forever in either direction. April did not respond. She picked up the movie offer and thumbed through it. It was almost too good to be true.

  “I wonder if we should get an agent or something. Or at least let our lawyer go through it.”

  “It’ll all work out in the end, dear. It always does.”

  “It’s so — you know. You wait your whole life for something like this, and when it finally happens . . .”

  “It is a lot of money.”

  “And we didn’t . . .”

  “We didn’t do nothing to earn it. It came looking for us.”

  “We’re just really on the edge of the story here . . .”

  “We’re furniture, honey. We’re the back-story. We’re white noise. But you know, maybe our time has come.”

  April read the offer through again from the beginning, the thick yellowed vellum scratching her fingers as she turned the pages, her eyes straining to read the infinitesimally small small print, handwritten in a fine hand, almost Lutheran in its pained, beautiful precision. Boyd put on a Mingus CD and played drums with two swizzle sticks, a red one and a green one, both shaped like little swords, both effortlessly mutilating the air in perfect time. Right bang in the pocket. And so they sat, each one resisting destiny, until April realized that things had gotten pretty quiet in the guest bedroom. A moment later, she heard someone stirring, then the door opened slowly and Ford emerged. He was holding a small lap dog that looked like one of those knitted dogs you’d put over a Kleenex dispenser. April had never noticed the dog before.

  Ford stood in the hallway for a long time, not speaking, his eyes watered over although he was not actually crying. Every once in a while the little dog looked up and licked his face. It had a goldy yellow bow in the middle of its forehead, a bow the same colour as Ford’s tie. They looked quite comical, the two of them together. The dog kind of resembled him, with its narrow eyes close together, its nose that hadn’t quite been grown into yet.

  “Well . . .” Ford said finally, drawling the word into extra innings. “It’s finished. I’ll be going now.”

  April got his coat from the coat rack by the front door and helped him put it on.

  “You’ve been most kind.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Boyd said, and he meant it.

  “It’s been an awful imposition.”

  “Nonsense,” said April.

  Ford closed his eyes, his lids fluttering quickly for several seconds, t
he little dog lapping his chin, before he finally reopened them.

  “It’s a far, far better —”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” Boyd deftly nudged the writer out the door.

  Ford thanked them both quietly, then left.

  “He’s a very polite man,” April said.

  “Yes,” Boyd said. “Almost too polite.”

  “I’m glad he’s gone.”

  “Me too.”

  “I wonder why his wife never showed. Carver’s, I mean? You’d think she’d of been here.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t married, April. Or maybe he was, but she got stuck in the snow.”

  That was a good point. It had been snowing for days.

  Boyd got up from the couch and moved to April’s chair. He put his arm around her. He snuggled up to her, almost bored into her like a tick in a deer’s ass. You can only get so close. There there there, she wanted to say. You get some rest, Boyd. You just let yourself get some rest. April put her hand on his shoulder, and at that moment she looked at Boyd and Boyd looked at her and it hit them: Carver was really dead. Now he was their problem.

  Gris-Gris Gumbo and Mrs. Charles Bukowski at the Mardi Gras Detox Centre

  THEORY I. A body at rest tends to remain at rest

  Six weeks. The doctor was clear. David Plumber would be in a coma for six weeks, then die, just like that. Kaput. Maybe that started his latest binge. It was ugly news for any man, and Plumber took it particularly hard. He’d never seen it coming. He’d just signed a new contract, two years with a two-year option. He wasn’t ready to die. He’d rather move to Siberia.

  The clinic had been his father’s idea. Dad had struggled on and off with booze for years and knew the signs. Dad insisted, Dave resisted. He was too handsome to be a drunk. But then when he got the death sentence — six weeks — he relented. It was the mechanical inevitability of existence. What could you do?

  Plumber quickly understood why actors were always checking themselves into these places. First of all, the coverage was great. Lilly really did a great job there. She must have been working the phones 24-7. Every major tab did something, and the stories were uniformly sympathetic.1 People was talking cover. They’d already sent a guy round to shoot it: Plumber nearly unconscious in a hospital bed,2 Dad posed grimly in the background, holding his son’s hand. Both looking haggard and handsome,3 an effect produced with harsh cross lighting and a special filter, which added a curious grainy texture to the final print. Kudos to the shooter, he really knew his stuff. But it wasn’t just the coverage; the atmosphere suited Plumber. It was actor heaven, everyone paying attention to him all the time. Talk about falling into a part. He was intuitively into it. All he had to do was show up, say some lines, whatever came into his head, really, and everyone seemed tremendously pleased. Dad was a bit of a pill — he always was, you’d almost think he was the one with six weeks left to live — and of course all that stuff with Nancy. But all in all things were good. Life, in fact, couldn’t get much better.