Greetings from the Vodka Sea Read online

  They gave a party in his honour. Plumber was asked to say a few words. He declined.

  Goldberg picked him up at the front door. A photographer snapped his photo stepping into the agent’s SUV. Plumber smiled and waved; Lilly had done it again. Plumber got in the car.

  Goldberg had good news. He’d landed Plumber a plumb job on Santa Clara Nights. He would play the Contessa’s good and evil twin sons. It was a field day for an actor of his calibre. Meanwhile, he would still stay under contract to Levitz and Sherwood, who had no immediate plans to kill him off.

  Plumber nodded. “Where’s Dad?”

  Goldberg revved the engine of his BMW SUV. The giant station wagon lurched into action.

  “I said, where’s Dad?”

  Goldberg smiled and looked in his side-view mirror.

  “Dad’s moving, baby. He’s going places, just like you.”

  Plumber looked out the window. Rain had begun to fall, streaking the glass. He looked at his watch. He’d been out of the clinic five minutes, and already he wanted a drink.49

  Sunshine Sketches of a Rat-Infested Shitbox

  Wonnacott had locked the door from the inside and placed the papier-mâché bust of Canada’s greatest literary criminal in the barred window. He pictured the police snipers, strategically positioned on rooftops along Park Street, taking aim, mistaking one dummy for another.

  Wonnacott removed his shoes and then the ancient Robes of State. But the mortarboard stayed. A nice touch. He went to the bed and pushed it to one side, quickly stripping the mattress. This was much better that the authors’ dinner, better by half than all the authors’ dinners in the world.

  Wonnacott pushed the mattress to the floor and lay down on it. From here, he could see out the window, past the vacant lot across the street and over and through the houses and off to the shadows of Lake Couchiching. He lay the Indian gun across his chest like an olde tyme sheriff.

  It had been easy enough to get back in. After he blew off the conference, he drove back to the Park House. Turner met him at the door in pyjamas, clearly impatient but not willing to appear impolite to a man who, let’s face it, was a minor celebrity in the country. A simple ruse (“I’m afraid I left my chapbook upstairs”) and a furtive glace at the Indian gun and that was it.

  Wonnacott stood and whipped off his pants.

  He found the switch to the overhead light, turned it off, then lay back on the bed again. He could hear the front door creak open and the irrational chatter from the street below as the Turners brought their neighbours up to date. Who knows what this man might do, they were saying; he was, after all a writer, and capable of anything.

  The lamp beside the bed illuminated the room, casting monster shadows on the walls. Wonnacott reached up and shut off the lamp. The room went dark. He could just see the flames rising from the Mariposa Belle.

  Go big or stay home.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the rats to come.

  . . .

  They’d spent the summer here together just after they first met. She worked as a cook in a day camp; he’d landed a job as a provincial enumerator. It was nostalgia that brought him back and nothing else. By now, Wonnacott had had his fill of these literary conferences: grey-haired men with last year’s soup on their ties, leaning too close with their coffee breath to make hideous puns or ask him if he’d ever actually met Pierre Berton. This one promised to be more odious than most — The Muse of Laughter: Sunshine Sketches of Stephen Leacock. It was inevitable; a middle-aged male writer with some reputation for wit could go only so far before being asked to deliver a lecture on Leacock, Canada’s official dullard laureate.

  Wonnacott had wondered if the rooming house on Park Street was still standing. The Park House, they’d called it twenty years earlier, when it had been a curious hybrid, a cross between a firetrap and a dump, a dirty, peeling friend to wood-worm and carpenter ant, the kind of place that only a pair of twenty-three- year-olds in love could find romantic. There were mice (every so often they’d find one floating in what passed for the kitchen sink with last night’s soaking dishes) and rats (the first night Thérèse caught one climbing out of her boot; she impaled it on a bread knife when it tried to hide behind the icebox) and raccoons (a nest in the attic, beside the wasps’ nest, not far from the covey of bats that daylighted upside-down on the cross-beams). The entire house death-rattled whenever someone flushed the ancient commode (rumoured to have survived the Peloponnesian Wars) or turned on the hot water without first turning on the cold or opened a tap on the top floor without shutting down the outflow valve for the storm sewer in the basement. The house death-rattled whenever the wind blew west from Lake Couchiching or north from Lake Simcoe or down from Washago, Muskoka or North Bay; when someone threw a rock into Shannon Bay, the sewers backed up; when someone had a glass of beer on Grape Island, the whole house teetered in sympathy. But it was summer and they were in love.

  The landlady’s name was Grace, but they called her dis-Grace because her own squalid room was filled with cat shit and bags of garbage, and she herself was half-cut on rye by lunch time and passed out in her housecoat and nylons by supper. They cooked their meals, canned soup, mostly, on a Sterno hotplate they stored in the clothes closet (no cooking in the rooms, Grace was firm on that), and slept on a pile of sleeping bags on the floor with one or several of Grace’s cats keeping them company, and made acrobatic love in every conceivable position, on every conceivable stick of furniture, at every conceivable time of day, taking special care that their screams of ecstasy could be heard no further than four blocks away. They were impossibly happy.

  . . .

  Friday night. Wonnacott had checked into his room at the Mariposa Belle. Like Leacock’s famously unfunny ship, the hotel had seen better days, half sunk, half run aground, the embodiment of middle age. Beside the reception desk, behind a glass case, a marbly bust of the great man sat on a wood pedestal, adorned with a black mortarboard, while inexplicable judicial robes hung as backdrop. In the corner was a cracked blunderbuss; “Leacock’s Indian Gun,” read the handwritten caption. There was a picture of the great man himself behind the desk, a rather too brown-and-blue portrait that bore the stench of commission. In one hand, Leacock held a book, a leathery, reptile tome; his other was hooked on his vest in that jaunty pose academics sometimes affect. His wispy hair writhed in grey and black serpents, more like the real-life Mark Twain than the real-life Stephen Leacock: perhaps the artist was trying to draw a comparison. For Wonnacott, the painting was a reminder of kind of failure that had come to define his country: Canada, the second-rate sketch writer, puffing and preening in the hope that it would be mistaken for a first-rate novelist.

  But his room was clean and quiet and afforded a decent view. He’d plugged a little hotplate, just for old time’s sake, into the octopus outlet behind the TV, and lay on the super single. He could see the wharf at Centennial Park and Veteran’s Park beyond it and beyond that Pumpkin Bay. He could see the rock at the tip of Heward’s Point, where he and Thérèse once made love, stopping only momentarily as a convoy of paddle-boating tourists flustered by. He got up and stepped onto the little balcony and looked north. He was too close to the water to see Park Street, but there, across the road in Couchiching Beach Park, was the Champlain Monument, commemorating a brief visit the Father of New France had made to the area in the summer of 1615. Once upon a time, under the light of an August moon, Thérèse stripped naked on its steps. She brought herself off, not allowing him to touch her, not allowing him to touch himself. If he so much as moved, she stopped, and would not start again until he promised to sit dead still. It was the single most erotic moment of his life. Wonnacott checked his printed itinerary. He was expected in the Lakeshore Room at six-thirty for a No-Host Reception. That gave him a little less than an hour. He lay on the bed, he quickly undressed.

  . . .

  He’d promised himself to save Park Street for Saturday afternoon. There was an Authors’ Breakfast in the mornin
g, and he wasn’t needed again until he gave his keynote speech at the formal dinner that evening. That left the afternoon free. But the reception had been all but unbearable and he’d drunk too much. The walk would do him good.

  For most of the reception he’d been pinned like a collected butterfly to a back wall along with the other authors, none of whom he liked or respected or, for that matter, had ever even bothered to read. There was Humphries, an unpleasant Upper Canadian in his mid-hundreds who’d written a scathing exposé on Dieppe (apparently, a lot of young men had been slaughtered needlessly), whose place at the conference was never satisfactorily explained, and a floating, perch-like academic who, between his doubtlessly fumbling attempts to seduce eighteen-year-old dowagers and his all-consuming habit of cultivating dandruff, had managed to find the time to write a humourless monograph on the function of wit in the academic writings of his honour, Lord Leacock. The crowning dung on the heap was a middle-aged woman in a knitted shawl who repeatedly referred to herself as “a poetess,” although, as near as Wonnacott could tell, she was a high school English teacher who’d once been banged by Irving Layton. She was Official Laureate of the conference, which meant, Wonnacott suspected, that the local paper would inflict one of her turdy little poems commemorating the event on its readers. Let’s see, what rhymes with flatulent?

  Wonnacott fielded the usual questions as Dutton, the beagle-faced administrator — who ran the conference with military precision — fed him scotch and ice. Yes, he’d been to Pierre Berton’s house. No, he didn’t know Margaret Atwood. Someone, a gentle former grad student named Mervin or Morris or something, even launched into a detailed appreciation of Wonnacott’s earliest and most deservedly obscure work, Flowers for the Sewer, elaborating on the book’s conflicting themes (love and death) and commenting on the challenges of character and narrative (female first person) and repeatedly referring to the title of the work until Wonnacott could no longer cower under the cover of indifference and good manners and practically screamed, “for the Steward, damn it, Steward.” Then came the inevitable hit-on by the woman with big tits and glasses, who’d offered to show him around the sights of Orillia (“Sights, plural?” he’d asided) and then mentioned, as if to lend the clandestine nightmare an odour of probity, that her husband was a volunteer driver for the festival. Her name was Luellen, and by that time Wonnacott was so drunk that he almost took her up on the offer. He did let her press up against him as the conversation persisted, with one of her larger breasts doing serious damage to his yellow and blue boutonniere, a gift from the festival sponsors, Granite Garden Lilies. When she excused herself to go to the bathroom (“Number one or number two?” he’d asided), Wonnacott slipped out the back door, grabbing a tray of finger sandwiches as he went. There were red sandwiches, blue sandwiches, yellow sandwiches and green sandwiches, and they all tasted the same. Some kind of fish-like thing. Fishy. Fish.

  . . .

  The route had not changed. The buildings were done up or undone, but mostly they were the same as they had always been. Orillia resisted change. First, he walked to the beach, intending to piss in Lake Couchiching for old time’s sake, and by the time he’d reached the wharf he’d made up his mind to swim. The cold water would wash out the cobwebs. But it was barely half-past nine when he reached the lakeshore, and the mild night air had drawn the locals out. He was forced to take his commemorative piss on the steps of the Champlain Monument. Then it was, as it always had been, west up Brandt Street (always “west up,” they’d said) and north on Park.

  The house was smaller than he remembered. And cleaner. The roof had been reshingled, and the dormer window, where they’d lain and watched the summer tick past like the last three minutes of math class, was significantly smaller than the dormer window of his imaginings: a portal, not a vista. He could see a couple, upper-middle-aged like him, sitting in the front room where Grace used to bathe in self-pity and filth. The man was reading a paper; the woman was knitting. A swing set rusted in the corner of the yard where the willow, upon which he’d carved their initials, once stood. Wonnacott realized that the heel of his shoe had fallen off. He wondered if he was too drunk to drive back to Toronto.

  . . .

  When he got back to his hotel room, he found Luellen sitting on the very corner of the bed.

  “I let myself in,” she said. “I have a friend who . . .”

  “Would you please leave.”

  She did not respond but instead removed her beige over-coat. She wore a leather bra and panties and garterless stockings.

  “Please. Don’t make me call the manager.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  She pulled her coat back on and seemed neither offended nor the slightest bit upset, as if the episode was simply a matter of course. All in a day’s work.

  Luellen stopped at the door. “Good night,” she said, her voice rising at the end. Her tone was familiar. Comforting.

  “Good evening,” he replied, bolting the door behind her.

  . . .

  Wonnacott was depressed. He tried to ring Thérèse but the line was busy. She was talking, forever talking. He put a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle on the hotplate, right on the element, just like they did for forty days and forty nights on Park Street, then opened the mini bar. He took out a tiny bottle of Canadian Club, or perhaps, he thought, it was a regular-sized bottle and he’d grown to gigantic proportions. Drink me, the bottle said. Drink me.

  The woman depressed him — Luellen — and the poetess and the academic and Mr. Dutton and General Montcalm and the earnest, hardworking grad student who’d only wanted to please him. But what depressed Wonnacott most was Wonnacott. He’d thought his trip to Orillia would take him back to happier times (not that times now were particularly unhappy or happy; they were simply times). But the town had changed just enough to remind him that it was no longer the same. In fact, the town looked younger and fresher, with new sidewalks and well-paved streets and rows of modern houses and a supermart where the grocery once stood. The town had gotten younger; only his memories were old. Time was the enemy, he liked to say. In fact, time had already won. It had sacked the present, injecting him with nostalgia, the morphine of the vanquished, as it marched on.

  Wonnacott had finished the Canadian Club and worked his way through a bottle of Smirnoff’s that seemed like a child’s toy in his gargantuan hand. The beer was next, and then the other beer and then the other . . .

  This time, Thérèse picked up the phone and answered in a dreamy voice.

  “Did I wake you, love?” he asked.

  Thérèse yawned, then lowered her voice. “I was waiting for your call . . .”

  “The line was busy . . .”

  “But now I can’t really talk. I have a man here.”

  “Really? Who’s that?”

  “Mmmm. Just an old friend.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m just about to fuck him, do you understand?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “I’ve got his cock in my hand and I’m about to put it in my mouth.”

  It was an old game. Whenever he went away, he would call her. They would make love from a distance with people they’d only just invented. Go big or stay home. That’s what Thérèse called it.

  “Just a moment.” Wonnacott kicked off his pants and hopped onto the bed.

  “Are you comfortable, now?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Good. Because he’s slipping his hands up my dress, and I want to tell you all about it . . .”

  . . .

  They had met on the bus to Orillia. By chance, he’d found himself alone in the back row with Thérèse and an old woman whom he mistook for her grandmother. Soon the old woman got off, leaving the two young people virtually alone. They had barely spoken up to this point, and both pretended to be engrossed in their reading material, when Thérèse subtly shifted her leg. Now, if he looked — and he did �
� he could see the edge of her panties. At this point, she began talking to him, as if she’d always known him. She wondered about the book he was reading (More Poems for People, by the radical poet Milton Acorn) and asked him if he liked Leonard Cohen and if he was going to Orillia and why (not so much why Orillia, but more a general why, why anything? Why not?). She had some beers in her backpack, and he had a couple of joints, which they smoked with their heads close to the window, carefully blowing the smoke outside so as not to alert the bus driver. Not that he really gave a shit. He probably enjoyed getting high on the job. Soon Wonnacott let his hand slip onto her knee, and she was asking him if he had a place to stay in Orillia and he already answering no. He moved his hand up her leg slowly. Until, that is, she grabbed it and slipped it inside her panties.

  “Maybe we could find a place together,” she said.

  He took another toke and tickled her pubic hair. It was a classic case of lust at first sight.

  . . .

  They used to stay up late and listen to the rats. At first she’d been afraid of them. He’d been afraid of them too but hid it better, using her fear as his camouflage. After impaling one of them that first night, she’d slept sitting upright with a cast iron frying pan in her hand. Both of them were wrecked for work the next day; she’d fallen asleep and burnt the macaroni lunch, he got into an argument with the second woman on his list, then packed it in early and got drunk with some Indians in Couchiching Park. In time they grew more comfortable with their roommates. They’d leave out bits of leftovers — there wasn’t much; it would have been fairer if the rats left food out for them — and it got to the point where a couple of the bigger, braver rats would eat right out of their hands. Not that any of them were tiny; on average, they were roughly the size and shape of a shoebox. Even the cats, great mousers in their own rights, mostly left the rats alone. By the end of the summer, he and Thérèse had come to see them as friends and more, gnawing, scurrying, voracious gods who watched over them as they slept.