CHAPTER FIVE

Wasn't that just like them or rather, in this respect, wasn't this one of them just like all the other ones who made up the rest of them, with all too few notable exceptions, keeping a fellow hanging around when he's straining at the leash, talking to him about feelings when the situation calls for action - and taking her sweet slow time to do it, looping back and forth, bringing up the distant past to account for the present, dwelling on incidents from the pre-D era to-oh, of course, it was all for his sake! - endeavor to clarify for D where she, Elizabeth, was, as we did not yet say, Coming From?

D identified with a goodly band of characters from literature - that was the past he preferred to have conjured - and the character he found had popped into his head, pooped and popped out again most recently was the Wedding Guest who beat his breast for he heard the loud bassoon.

D had been compelled to sit (or pace) in the coachhouse for what felt like two months (but was actually more like two hours) while Elizabeth (they were drinking Seagrams and ginger ale: Elizabeth had begun to lisp) sifted through the dust from one more chunk of her life story searching for some glinty flakes, bits of essence, nutty grit amid the yellow huskings of experience... D grew erratically poetic when drinking and made to wait. To the gods of Impatience a large portion of his young life had been dedicated - sacrificed really, for it was not to come again - and this tendency, with all the inertia of the uninspected, meant to exact further and continuous tribute from its acolyte.

Which made things tough for D, since he was, in the other half of his being, Patience personified, having in fact passed several years here and there as a virtual catatonic. His patient part resented the chivvying from his impatient part, dug in its heels, wasting, in the opinionof his impatient portion, even more time, a waste which required the hurry-up button to be leant on, long and hard. Or depressed in a series of sharp short jabs. So his was an inner conflict and of course, Elizabeth was a handy target for projection. "For Crissake, everyone'll be passed out by the time we get there - we're gonna miss the Party!" Elizabeth looked, probably was, genuinely startled. Why blame her? Other times, D enjoyed hearing her tales of the UR-Time, of the world of the University of British Columbia shortly after WW2, a time of nonconformity. "Those veterans weren't about to take orders from anyone any more," Beth was wont to say, "and they wanted to have fun!" And then she'd laugh the laugh that says "And they got it, too, and spread it around." Beth was just two years older than D, she had entered university at sixteen, a grade-skipper in high school who was thus suddenly plunged into the social-intellectual whirl of college amid demobbed thirty-year-olds aged further by close calls with violent death, kept immature (on the other hand) by the parenting of the armed forces and the weird irresponsibility of life at war. Their morals, too, were in flux. D could connect with this. He had used, during the war, when he was trying to stay alive in London, a series of Canuck soldiers as surrogate big brothers, and was drawn to the wilder among them, with their tales of "liberation" of this or that prized item... Later D was to find a like enchantment in the British phrase "Fell orf the back of a lorry." "Ere, mate, have some of these - fell orf the back of a lorry." D didn't seem to have any morals at all, except where phrasing was concerned. So it was some relief to his loneliness when he heard such lines. However, he did have ideals; in fact it was his true work at this time in his life to realize these; of course, being ideals, they refused to be realized, and so one might say that his true work at this time was to destroy his ideals and grow up. This mission was rendered complex by his association with Beth. She had done a lot of growing up; so much so that she quite easily mothered D, which hampered him in his quest for independence. But since D didn't know the name of his quest, their conflict always surprised him. He knew himself to mean well where this woman was concerned.

D thought his search was for himself - the old "Who am I?" pilgrimage. But lately he had heard that what he was actually doing was looking for roles to play. The woman who had told him this, A, was a cool blonde with a swan hairdo who dressed well, i.e., like Beth, who also wore a swan, and dressed like a sorority girl who happened to have good taste - dressed up rather than down. Until meeting up with these middle-class Canadians, D had known nothing about clothes, and had gone whole years during his agricultural practice wearing the same pair of pants; he had ergo known nothing about laundering, and therefore these proved lonely years.

D's mother had not had the heart for this kind of education. He was a not-so-noble savage when he entered the University of British Columbia. At first he resisted all attempts to civilize him, but he realized he liked looking at offbeat elegance, and he let M pick out some of his clothes - pipestem cord suits still looked better on M, possibly thanks to M's perfect physique, but Beth found it some kind of an improvement. In the photo taken of D winning the CBC Playwriting Award, he sports as well a narrow, narrow tie, also courtesy of M's up-to-datedness. It had been purchased along with the suit at Frederick and Nelson's during a Seattle visit, of which more anon.

Now, therefore, four years into his college days, D began to have a rudimentary-my-dear-Delsing sense of what others used to disguise their nakedness. A wore skirt-suits, or tight pants on her elegant legs. In the matter of self-assurance, she was not yet quite Beth's match. Beth's was an assurance shared by her women friends from her college days. These came from money, more or less. D didn't think that A did. (Therefore, forty years later, Beth's group had lost their money, while A had acquired some). But that made for an interesting combination. D didn't come from money either; but his way with words meant that he never let money talk down to him. Right or wrong, he believed he could see through that shit, and he treasured the saying "Keep your thoughts to yourself - there's a rich man coming" for what it said about society, but not as advice he would ever heed - the snotnose scholarship boy.

D figured A was going to be at the party, and he hoped to talk with her some more. Of course she was going out with G, suddenly, so anything else was out of the question, but then "anything else," although uppermost in his consciousness sixteen hours a day, wasn't (little did D know it) really what he was after. He wanted the woman to talk with, to talk with him. Even that was less than most of what he was after. For D really wanted to be the woman, he wanted, like all hero-worshipers, to become the object of his worship. What a burden, and for all concerned. And so, having met A, and spoken with her, D wanted to know more about her.

D had told Beth of the events the three had witnessed the night before. She had looked quizzical, as if he was trying to tell her a joke with no punchline. Then she had laughed anyway. Off and on throughout the day he had tuned in to CKIK, but no reports had surfaced - and yet it was impossible that just those three should have seen a flash that grand, equally impossible that if anyone else had, no news of it had reached the radio or TV stations. Very odd, they agreed, replenishing their drinks.

D had been looking out the window-not easy to do, had to stand on tiptoe - at twilight deepening over the millionaire plumage of the gardens of Shaughnessy, and now turned back to Beth, puzzled by her silence, to find (O no!) she had passed out on the couch. Just then a car pulled up and Tommy P stepped out. D watched him smooth his black hair down with the flat of one hand, then run a comb through it with the other, patting the small wave in front until he had it just so. Tommy was wearing pegged pants although it was now the sixties. He had worn them in Edmonton when he first got busted for boosting heaps, and they became forever part of his image, along with the dark glasses and the rat-tail comb.

He swaggered in at the door. "Same old scene I see," he said, pouring a stiff one and stirring in the mix with the tail of his comb, which he then licked before smirking "how long she been bye-byes?"
"Just," D replied, picking up Tommy's glass and drinking.

"You want to make that party, man?"

"Sure," D said, "But we got to get Beth upstairs first."

"Fuck that," said the newcomer, adjusting his shades, "Let's just leave her where she is."

"Can't, man," D told him, "Remember? Axel is on the prowl. Got to erect the painting."

Axel is the European gambler Beth lived with for three years prior to D's coming into her life. She sat in all-nite joints watching him lose her inheritance while she knitted. Then she went to work the next day. Beth finally managed to leave Axel, with a little help from her friends. Axel had dropped from sight but had recently re-surfaced, reported as waving a pistol in a club and promising to use it on Beth when he found where she's living. From the outside, the coachhouse appeared to be one story; the tiny window of the bedroom might merely give onto attic space. So each night, when they went up to bed, Beth and D hung a painting, large enough to almost completely fill the doorway (but no door is there) at the foot of the -

[The painting was a genuine Gherkinczy, that is to say, a complete fake. Montgomery Incline, eager to spend more time with Joan Nevers, and having discovered that she painted, and being coincidentally the (unpaid) publicity person for the upcoming Little Theater production of "The Matchmaker" (starring, by the way, Georgia Littlewood, D's ex-wife), decided to stage an art hoax in the theater's lobby; came up with the notion that a Madame Gherkinczy, a Czech in exile, was to have her North American premiere there, then set Joan up with paint and canvas and gallon jugs of Regal Sherry until she came up with a Roualt-like series of portraits (the one D and Beth used to hide the stairway was a Regal Sherry-ish impression of D, Montgomery Incline, and noted Vancouver theater impresario Ian Newhouse, who had fucked more of the women D knew than any other single man (though Ian Newhouse was married)).

The hoax had fooled the Vancouver Bun reporter sent to cover it: a large pic of D had adorned the front cover of the arty section, with D ("noted UBC art critic") being quoted saying some nonsense about these wretched oils, and Joan Nevers (dark glasses, Italian scarf over red hair, cigarette holder) being quoted on the oppressive regimes in Prague and Ottawa. This all went missing from the later edition; an editor familiar with the name and M.O. of Montgomery Incline, master of a thousand hoaxes, had seen through the team's little ruse.]

- stairs, to disguise the upper story from Axel should he break in.

Therefore Tommy and D must now lug Beth, no mere slip of a thing, up the steep and narrow (and twisting ) staircase, so that the painting could be put in place and the dwelling rendered Axel-proof. This manouever struck both as very funny, and even Beth, in her happy state, smiled as if to go along with the lark. D tucked her in (still fully clothed) and, stopping only to install the painting and top off the Seagrams bottle with ginger ale, the lads slammed the doors of Tommy's Pontiac and slid off into the velvet night of a thousand eyes - D scanning the horizon for any further flashes while telling Tommy what he saw the night before.... Tommy is naturally unbelieving.

"College kids go ga-ga on dago red."

D chortled. He had long since learned to live without Tommy's validation.

They glided along the tree-hung streets, broad and quiet in this part of town, D speaking while Tommy vented occasional snorts of disbelief. D hadn't meant to tell Tom until G and M were also present. That way, Tom would at least be impressed with the way these three had worked out an elaborate lie. Tom believed nothing-why would he believe this? Except, sometimes, Tommy believed D because he could get D to tell him all his.

Five years ago on the prairie working in a mental hospital, D had been looking for a brother-confessor. In return, he learnt about jazz: and about Tommy's secrets, about boosting cars and stripping them down, taking these items to a fence, getting caught, appearing in court, then, being given the choice of jail or a socially helpful job, choosing the latter (natch)...so for Tom this job was the next worst thing to being in the slammer. D framed it this way. To do so was tactless, but he wanted to see if he could nettle the guy.

"Yeah, same as it is for you," was the laconic response. D saw that this was true.

He saw that he didn't have to pretend with Tom that he believed in his job, that it was a great way of doing good, that the low pay was made up for by the spiritual benefits. He saw that it was a shit job, performed for the socially trapped by those only slightly less so. He recalled (for himself as much as for Tom) the circumstances that had forced him into this occupation - the string of jobs that had paid even less, his improvidence, his inability to resist the merest impulse... They got very drunk and became staggering friends. When they got kicked out of the dorms for having their chests-of-drawers filled with empties, they took an apartment together and D began to meet the delinquents Tom was no longer supposed to associate with. They would drive clear across Edmonton (not quite so far in the mid-Fifties) because there was a beer parlour that served cheese and onion sandwiches. There they would all play bullshit poker until it was time for the employed among them to go to work (D and Tom were on the afternoon shift).

One day, they followed a firetruck to the fire. It was their own apartment. Some of Tom's 33s had melted - it had been D's cigar that had fallen into the couch. They found another flat, a place where the floor sloped so decidedly that a bottle could roll from one end of the pad to the other (there was little furniture to stop it). Spring finally came, and D entrained for the Coast. One night six months later, Tom turned up on his doorstep. Tom's folks had moved out here, and he had come with them. They went over to Toms' place - he had the entire basement to himself - and tied one on. D told Tom about university, and Tom told D about hitting a concrete lamp standard with his father's chevy.

D glanced sideways at Tommy P, his carefully tended black hair with a wave in front, the shades, the Brando pout and hunch, the slightly zooty outfit, the faint but unwavering air of amusement his friend emanated... amusement and malice, slight, but there to be sniffed on the characterological breeze. It appeared to appeal to some of D's newer friends, too. Tom had become an attraction at their parties.

The Hillcoots especially loved him. They were a dramatic family in all senses - D had gone briefly with their daughter, Gloria, an actress - and Gloria's mother was given, 'round midnight, to manifesting at the top of the stairs, bare naked, declaring "I'm Norma!" then regally if unsteadily descending. While Norma did this and other party tricks, husband Gordie would chat pleasantly on - quite uninterruptible - about his time spent flying biplanes in the Yukon. They liked it when Tommy sat on the round coffee table clutching flowers from various vases, wearing his shades and declaring that he must run out into the street with his hair down so. He showed no sign of actually carrying this out, but they liked this beatnik having memorized The Waste-Land. The other guests were intrigued, too. Among these was another Tom, surname beginning with W, and so it became necessary to have a Tommy W and a Tommy P. In one quick act of naming, Tom was put on a par with one of the Giant Esthetes on campus. (Oh, there were Giants in those days! Tommy W bestrode the campus like a colossus. D had stood agape, an attendant lord, as tears came to Tommy's eyes when he spoke the lines "Down, down I come like glistering Phaeton, wanting the manage of unruly jades! In the base court, where men grow base..." He sounded like he knew whereof he spoke.

Those Hillcoot days were over now, alcohol having taken its toll (Norma was drying out at a clinic, and Gloria had married Nick, an Arty Major, and borne him twins) but Tommy P had made an easy transition alongside D to the next party crowd, crowds. He went everywhere with D and Beth, and several of their acquaintance believed them to be a ménage a trois. D liked this as long as it wasn't true.

They pulled into a driveway, semi-circular, behind a raft of other cars - those closest to the mansion parked neatly, the more recent arrivals at rakish angles over the lawn. As they got out they could hear screams from the grounds as well as from inside. Yelps, more like it. Squeals. Coarse, low laughter. D saw people he knew chasing and being chased by others he didn't. The anti-semite, Fee McMannic (if M was to be believed), was - was nailing someone to a cross against the east wall! And surely that was M, helping him? And it was G they were crucifying!

But no coming closer D saw that the three of them were trying to repair some trellis work that had come down - because, he shortly learned, Ham Meatfist had decided to leave the living room via a window, that was further from the lawn than he'd realized. Ham lay motionless in a bed of rhododendrons. Fee scowled as D and Tommy came within scowling distance. This meant, D knew, that Fee was glad to see them. It counted, because this was Fee's place. Or rather, his parents' place. D hoped they had gone away for longer than a weekend. It was going to take time to put things back together. Glancing through the open door, he could spy further structural damage - it was going to take more than a hungover Sunday to fix all that. And the ruination was still going on. D elbowed his way through the Earl Grey kitchen crowd and hunted up the Lord Byng intellectuals ensconced in a small den lined with books. (These were books about real estate but at first glance resembled a professorial stash). Angus Carey had the floor, in fact was wiping it with Jackie Krock, the hopelessly inebriate (Dewars) editor of the local litmag Smoking Carrion.

"But look here old chep," Angus was purring, one hand twirling the waxed point of his left mustache. "Look here, read the depths of degradation to which your inertial humanism has brought you. High hopes, desperate crashes. Liberate yourself, my dear fellow, come to see yourself as a unit in a system, so much empirical evidence, an instance of a general disposition. After all, old chep, you are, simply put, a tiny part of an arc of tendency.... Look to what your enormous outlay of energy has reduced you, and why? What for? All in the name of inspiration! The novel of the future, I can tell you, will be written by a sociologist. Your intuitions are pimples on the face of the times."

Krock, supported by the bookcase, swayed forward, head down. His words could be caught intermittently: "....carried alive into the heart by pashun...fire of individu,um,al, jeenyus...what thought was oft, ne'er well so expressed...rell-wart urn..." - it didn't matter to D that Krock's phrases kept coming up short on verbs: D had heard this spiel before, while its utterer was stone sober.

D felt that drunkenness somewhat improved it, bringing it a little closer to Pound's Cantos, a little further away from the Hall-Pack-Simpson anthology New Poets of England and America. But Angus Carey was merciless. "Look at you, you poor, pathetic creature, you dribbling excuse for an argument, you stalwart appendage to the term nincompoop, how dare you presume upon our time with your shopworn verses and their enfeebled defense? The art of poetry has been studied systematically over the past half century by research scientists working in a variety of fields. Some of these - "

" - were cunning linguists," put in Dan Danielson, who didn't think that parties should be for anything but singing (them) and playing the ukulele (him).

Before Carey could conclude, Krock lunged towards him, screaming "I'm going to kill you! Refute this!" A coffee table was in his way, however, and it sent Krock sprawling. This allowed Carey enough time to exit with dignity, for all the world as though he had been about to leave in any case. D saw his opportunity and intercepted with "Angus, I've got something to tell you. But let's find G and M first - they want to tell you too. "

"Goodness gracious me, " drawled Angus, fiddling with his mustache again, "What ever can it be? Are you three laddies about to serenade me? " As D and his companion became increasingly lost in the throng, Carey visibly relaxed. Krock would never find him now. D glimpsed Tommy P on a couch with Caroline Anthrax perched upon his knee. Turning a corner, they were confronted with the objects of their mission. They stood one on either side of A, practicing stichomythia.

"My stomach empty and happy," chanted M; then,

"Desire makes it impossible to eat anything," from G.

"She took my pork and put it in a tin," M continued;

"History is full of holes," responded G.

Seizing the chance, D cried "and no hole bigger than last night's!" thrusting Angus into the center of the group.