Stone Mattress: Nine Tales Read online

  She’s taken to renaming him according to her own analysis of his mood of the day, or his mood of the hour, or his mood of the minute: according to her, he’s moody. Each mood is personified and given an honorific, so he’s Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Sleepy, Dr. Ironic, Sir Sardonic, and sometimes, when she’s being sarcastic or possibly nostalgic, Mr. Romantic. A while back she used to call his penis Mr. Wiggly, but she’s given up on that, and on her attempts to revive his nonexistent libido with unguents and sex jellies that taste of strawberry jam and invigorating ginger lemon and toothpaste mint. There was also an adventure with a hair dryer that he would prefer to forget. “It’s quarter to four,” she continues. “Let’s get ready for our company!” Next will come the hairbrush – that’s one thing he’s managed to hold on to, his hair – and then the lint brush. Doglike, he sheds.

  “Who is it this time?” says Gavin.

  “A very nice woman,” says Reynolds. “A nice girl. A graduate student. She’s doing her thesis on your work.” She herself had once been doing her thesis on his work: that had been his downfall. It had been very seductive to him, then, to have an attractive young woman paying such concentrated attention to his every adjective.

  Gavin groans. “Thesis on my fucking work,” he says. “Christ defend us!”

  “Now, Mr. Profanity,” says Reynolds. “Don’t be so mean.”

  “What the fuck is this learned scholar doing in Florida?” says Gavin. “She must be a moron.”

  “Florida’s not the hick town you keep saying it is,” says Reynolds. “Times have changed; they’ve got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic. I’m impressed,” says Gavin.

  “Anyway,” says Reynolds, ignoring him, “she isn’t from Florida. She’s flown in from Iowa just to interview you! People all over are doing work on your work, you know.”

  “Iowa, fuck,” says Gavin. Work on your work. Sometimes she talks like a fiveyearold.

  Reynolds gets going with the lint brush. She attacks his shoulders, then takes a playful swipe in the direction of his crotch. “Let’s see if there’s any lint on Mr. Wiggly!” she says.

  “Keep your lustful claws off my private parts,” says Gavin. He feels like saying that of course there’s lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time. But he refrains.

  To rust unburnished, not to shine in use, he thinks. Tennyson. Ulysses sets out on his last voyage, lucky him, at least he’ll sink with his boots on. Not that Greeks wore boots. One of the first poems Gavin had to memorize in school; he turned out to be good at memorizing. Shameful to admit, but that’s what turned him on to poetry: Tennyson, an outmoded Victorian windbag, writing about an old man. Things have a habit of coming full circle: a bad habit, to his mind.

  “Mr. Wiggly likes my lustful claws,” says Reynolds. How gallant of her to put that in the present tense. It used to be a game of theirs – that Reynolds was the seductress, the dominatrix, the femme fatale, and he was her passive victim. She’d seemed to enjoy that scenario, so he went along. Now it’s no longer a game; none of the old games work. It would only make both of them sad to attempt to revive them.

  This isn’t what she signed up for when she married him. She most likely envisioned a fascinating life, filled with glamorous, creative people and stimulating intellectual chit-chat. And that did happen some, when they were first married; that, and the flare-up of his still active hormones. The last kaboom of the firecracker before it fizzled; but now she’s stuck with the burntout aftermath. In his more lenient moments, he feels sorry for her.

  She must be finding consolation elsewhere. He would if he was her. What does she really do when she goes out to her spinning classes or off to her so-called dancing evenings with her socalled girlfriends? He can imagine, and does. Such imaginings once bothered him, but now he contemplates Reynolds’s possible transgressions – not only possible, but almost certain – with clinical detachment. She’s surely entitled to some of that: she’s thirty years younger than him. He probably has more horns on his head – as the bard would say – than a hundredheaded snail.

  Serves him right for marrying a youngster. Serves him right for marrying three of them in a row. Serves him right for marrying his graduate students. Serves him right for marrying a bossy, selfappointed custodian of his life and times. Serves him right for marrying.

  But at least Reynolds won’t leave him, he’s fairly certain of that. She’s polishing up her widow act; she wouldn’t want it to go to waste. She’s so competitive that she’ll hang in there to make sure neither of the two previous wives can lay claim to any part of him, literary or otherwise. She’ll want to control his narrative, she’ll want to help write the biography, if any. She’ll also want to cut out his two children – one from each ex-wife, and hardly children any longer, since one of them must be fifty-one, or maybe fifty-two. He hadn’t paid much attention to them when they were babies – they and their pastel, urine-soaked paraphernalia had taken up so much space, they’d attracted so much attention that ought to have been his, and he’d decamped in each case before they were three – so they don’t like him much, nor does he blame them, having hated his own father. Nevertheless there’s sure to be some squabbling after the funeral: he’s making sure of that by not finalizing his will. If only he could hover around in mid-air to watch!

  Reynolds gives him a final stroke with the lint brush, does up his second-from-the-top shirt button, tugs his collar into place. “There,” she says. “Much better.”

  “Who is this girl?” he says. “This girl who’s so interested in my so-called work. Got a cute butt?”

  “Stop that,” says Reynolds. “Your whole generation was obsessed with sex. Mailer, Updike, Roth – all of those guys.”

  “They were older than me,” says Gavin.

  “Not much. It was sex, sex, sex with them, all the time! They couldn’t keep it zipped!”

  “Your point being?” says Gavin coolly. He’s relishing this. “Is that bad, sex? Are you a little prude all of a sudden? What else should we have been obsessed with? Shopping?”

  “My point being,” says Reynolds. She has to pause, reconsider, rally her inner battalions. “Okay, shopping is a poor substitute for sex, granted. But faut de mieux.”

  That hurts, thinks Gavin. “Faut de what?” he says.

  “Don’t play dumb, you understood me. My point being, not everything is about butts. This woman’s name is Naveena. She deserves to be treated with respect. She’s already published two papers on the Riverboat years. She happens to be very bright. I believe she’s of Indian extraction.”

  Of Indian extraction. Where does she pick up these archaic locutions? When she’s trying to be properly literary she talks like a comic lady in an Oscar Wilde play. “Naveena,” he says. “Sounds like cheese food slices. Or better – like a hair-removal cream.”

  “You don’t have to disparage people,” says Reynolds, who used to dote on the fact that he disparaged people, or at least some people; she’d thought it meant that he had a superior intellect and an informed taste. Now she thinks it’s merely nasty, or else a symptom of a vitamin deficiency. “It’s so knee-jerk with you! Running them down doesn’t make you any bigger, you know. Naveena happens to be a serious literary scholar. She has an M.A.”

  “And a cute butt, or else I’m not talking to her,” says Gavin. “Every halfwit has an M.A. They’re like popcorn.” He puts Reynolds through this every time – every time she trots out some new aficionado, some new aspirant, some new slave from the salt mines of academe – because he has to put her through something.

  “Popcorn?” says Reynolds. Gavin flounders momentarily – now what did he mean by that? He takes a breath. “Tiny little kernels,” he says. “Superheated in the academic cooker. The hot air expands. Poof! An M.A.” Not bad, he thinks. Also true. The universities want the cash, so they lure
these kids in. Then they turn them into puffballs of inflated starch, with no jobs to match. Better to have a certificate in plumbing.

  Rey laughs, a little sourly: she has an M.A. herself. Then she frowns. “You should be grateful,” she says. Here comes the scolding, the whack with the rolled-up newspaper. Bad Gavvy! “At least someone’s still interested in you! A young person! Some poets would kill for that. The ’60s is hot right now, lucky for you. So you can’t complain of being neglected.”

  “Since when have I done that?” he says. “I never complain!”

  “You complain all the time, about everything,” says Reynolds. She’s reaching the fed-up moment; he shouldn’t take it any further. But he does.

  “I should have married Constance,” he says. That’s his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears. Top marks: a slammed door. Or a projectile. She winged him with an ashtray once.

  Reynolds smiles. “Well, you didn’t marry Constance,” she said. “You married me. So suck it up.”

  Gavin misses a beat. She’s playing impervious. “Oh, if only I could,” he says, with exaggerated longing.

  “Dentures are no impediment,” says Reynolds crisply. She can be a bitch when he pushes her too far. The bitchiness is a thing he admires in her, though reluctantly when it’s turned on him. “Now I’m going to get the tea ready. If you don’t behave yourself when Naveena comes, you won’t get a cookie.” The cookie ploy is a joke, her attempt to lighten things up, but it’s faintly horrifying to him that the threat of being deprived of such a cookie hits home. No cookie! A wave of desolation sweeps through him. Also he’s drooling. Christ. Has it come down to this? Sitting up to beg for treats?

  Reynolds marches out to the kitchen, leaving Gavin alone on the sofa gazing at the view, such as it is. There’s a blue sky, there’s a picture window. The window gives onto a fenced enclosure in which there’s a palm tree. Also a jacaranda, or is it a frangipani? He wouldn’t know, they only rent this house.

  There’s a swimming pool that he never uses, although it’s heated. Reynolds plunges into it occasionally before he wakes up in the morning, or so she says: she likes to flaunt such examples of her physical agility. Leaves fall into the pool from the jacaranda or whatever it is, and also spiky prongs from the palm. They float around on the surface, swirling in the slow eddy caused by the circulation pump. A girl comes by three times a week and skims them out with a net on a long handle. Her name is Maria; she’s a high school student; she’s included in the rent. She lets herself in through the garden gate with a key and moves over the tiled and slippery patio noiselessly on rubber soles. She has long dark hair and a lovely waist, and may possibly be Mexican; Gavin doesn’t know because he’s never spoken to her. She always wears shorts, light blue denim or darker blue denim, and she bends over in her denim shorts while skimming out the leaves. Her face, when he’s able to see it, is impassive, though verging on the solemn.

  Oh Maria, he sighs to himself. Are there troubles in your life? If not, there soon will be. What a trim ass you have. All the better to wig and wag.

  Does she ever see him watching her through the picture window? Most likely. Does she think he’s a lecherous old man? Very probably. But he isn’t exactly that. How to convey the mix of longing, wistfulness, and muted regret that he feels? His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be. How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can no longer taste it?

  He’s writing a poem that begins “Maria skims the dying leaves.” Though technically speaking the leaves are already dead.

  The doorbell rings, and Reynolds clatters into the hall. There are female greeting sounds from the entranceway, that cooing and come-inning and pigeon oodle-ooing that women do nowadays. They’re going over each other with the woo-woo ooo sounds as if they’re best friends, though they’ve never met. The contact was through email, which Gavin despises. He should not have despised it, however: handing over control of his correspondence to Reynolds has been a mistake, because it’s given her the keys to the kingdom: she’s now the gatekeeper to the Kingdom of Gavin. Nobody gets in unless she says so.

  “He’s just been having a nap,” says Reynolds, using that mock-reverential tone she slides into when about to display him to third parties. “Would you like a peek at his study first? Where he does his writing?”

  “Oh, ooodle-oo,” says the voice of Naveena, which must indicate delight. “If it’s all right.” Clickety-click down the corridor go their two pairs of shod feet.

  “He can’t write on a computer,” Reynolds is saying. “He has to use a pencil. He says it’s a hand-eye thing.”

  “Awesome,” says Naveena.

  Gavin hates his study with a rancorous hatred. He hates this study – which is only a temporary one – but especially he hates his real study, back in British Columbia. It was designed for him by Reynolds, and has quotations from his mostanthologized poems stencilled on its kidneycoloured walls in white paint; so he has to sit in there surrounded by monuments of his own decaying magnificence while all around him the air is thick with shreds and tatters of the stellar poetic masterpieces he’d once revered, the shards of well-wrought urns, the broken echoes of other men’s wit and scope.

  Reynolds tends both of his studies as if they’re shrines and he their graven image. She makes a production of sharpening his pencils and blocking all phone calls and shutting him in there. Then she tiptoes around outside as if he’s on life support, and then he can’t write a word. He can’t spin straw into gold, not in that mausoleum of a study: Rumpelstiltskin, the malicious, twisted dwarf who’s the most likely shape of his Muse these days – tardy Rumpelstiltskin never shows up. Then it will be lunchtime, and Reynolds will gaze at him hopefully across the table and say, “Anything new?” She’s so proud of how she protects his privacy, and fosters his communion with his own poetic juices, and enables what she calls his “creative time.” He doesn’t have the heart to tell her he’s dry as a bone.

  He needs to get out, out of here; at least outside the study, the two studies, with their arid scent of embalmed pages. In the ’60s, when he was living with Constance in that cramped, sultry steam bath of a room where they stewed like prunes, back when they had no money and he certainly had no la-de-dah study, he could write anywhere – in bars, in fast-food joints, in coffee shops – and the words would flow out of him and through the pencil or the ballpoint onto anything flat and handy. Backs of envelopes, paper napkins; a cliché, granted, but it was true all the same.

  How to get back there? How to get that back?

  Clickety-click, back in his direction. “Right through here,” says Reynolds.

  Naveena is ushered into the living room. She’s a beautiful little creature, practically a child. Big, shy dark eyes. She has earrings in the shape of octopuses, or octopi. You’ve got seafood on your ears, he might begin if he was intending to pick her up in a bar, but he doesn’t try that now. “Oh, please don’t get up,” she says, but Gavin makes a show of hauling himself to his feet so he can shake her hand. He holds it – deliberately – a little too long.

  Then the pillows must be rearranged by Reynolds, doing her competent-nurse act. What would happen if Gavin were to grab the black-pullovered tit that’s being thrust into his eye and use it as a lever to flip Reynolds over onto her back like a turtle? A jolly thriving wooer. Screaming, recriminations, the Saran Wrap ripped off their bowl of marital leftovers, in front of a galvanized audience of one. Would that kind of uproar get him out of this bush-league interview?

  But he doesn’t want to get out of it, not yet. Sometimes he enjoys these ordeals. He enjoys saying he can’t remember writing that piece of word salad, whatever it may be; he enjoys blowing off the poems these sentimental kids produce as their favourites. Crap, drivel, trash! He enjoys telling tales on his erstwhile poet buddies, his erstwhile rivals. Most of them are dead,
so no harm done. Not that harm done would stop him.

  Rey inserts Naveena into the easy chair where she can get a full frontal view of him. “It’s such an honour to meet you,” she says, deferentially enough. “This is weird, but I feel as if I, like … as if I kind of actually know you. I guess it’s because of studying your work, and everything.” She may be of Indian extraction, but the voice is pure Midwest.

  “Then you have the advantage of me,” says Gavin. He leers like a troll: it can throw them off their stride, that leer of his.

  “Pardon?” says Naveena.

  “He means that although you know a lot about him, he doesn’t know anything about you,” says Reynolds, interposing herself as usual. She casts herself as his interpreter; as if he’s an oracle, spouting gnomic sayings that only the high priestess can decipher. “So why don’t you tell him what you’re working on? What part of his work? I’ll go and make us some tea.”

  “I’m all ears,” says Gavin, holding his leer.

  “Don’t bite her,” says Reynolds with a parting twitch of her tight jeans. Good exit line: the possibility of biting, so double-edged, so vague as to location and intent, hovers in the air like an aroma. Where would he begin, if biting was on offer? A gentle nibbling at the nape of the neck?

  It’s no use. Even this prospect fails to stir him. He stifles a yawn.

  Naveena fidgets with a miniature gadget that she then places on the coffee table in front of him. She’s wearing a miniskirt that rides up over her knees, displaying patterned stockings like lace window curtains dyed black, and also painfully high-heeled boots with metal studs. It makes Gavin’s feet hurt to look at the boots. Surely her toes must be squashed into wedges, like bound Chinese feet in sepia photos. Those warped feet were a sexual turn-on, or so Gavin has read. Guys would slide their Mr. Wigglies into the moist orifice formed by the recurved, stunted toes. He can’t see it himself.